From the field
and from the desk.

Trade volume between Türkiye and Russia has been contracting for three years. According to the Ministry of Trade's 2026 Russia country profile, total trade between the two countries stood at 56.5 billion dollars in 2023, 52.6 billion dollars in 2024 and 49.1 billion dollars in 2025. The export side is the striking part: Türkiye's exports to Russia fell from 10.9 billion dollars in 2023 to 6.7 billion dollars in 2025, a decline of 21.5 percent in a single year. Imports, by contrast, held largely steady at 42.4 billion dollars; oil and oil products, semi-finished steel, wheat and sunflower oil make up the bulk of them. The picture shows that the flow has changed not in volume but in direction and product mix.

Sanctions packages now target the vessel and the port directly

The two EU packages of 2026 differ from earlier rounds in logistics terms. The 20th package, adopted on 23 April 2026, listed 46 further vessels, raising the total number of ships covered by the 'shadow fleet' designation to 632; these vessels are barred from entering EU ports and from receiving EU-sourced maritime services. The same package imposed a transaction ban on the port of Karimun in Indonesia and on Murmansk and Tuapse in Russia, and activated the EU's anti-circumvention instrument for the first time. In addition, 60 third-country companies, including entities based in China, Türkiye, Thailand and the UAE, were brought under tightened export restrictions.

The 21st package, which entered into force on 23 July 2026, continued along the same line: 41 further vessels were added, taking the number of listed ships past 670; five bunkering tankers were listed for the first time; the Russian ports of Olya and Vysotsk were brought into scope; a ban with a six-month transition period was imposed on the Kulevi refinery in Georgia; and five oil traders, among them a UAE-based company, were listed. The price cap for Russian crude was fixed at 44.10 dollars per barrel and the automatic revision mechanism was suspended until 15 July 2027. The import ban on Russian LNG supplied under long-term contracts starts on 1 January 2027. On top of this, the full blocking sanctions the United States imposed on Rosneft and Lukoil in October 2025 pushed refiners in many countries, Türkiye among them, to change suppliers; Tüpraş giving greater weight to Iraqi-origin blends similar to Urals is one example.

The real bottleneck: payment, insurance and paperwork

In practice the problem is more often the bank than customs. As sanctions lists have widened and third-country companies have been drawn into scope, banks have begun to step back even from transactions that are not themselves covered by sanctions. The practical consequences are clear: opening a letter of credit becomes harder and more expensive, finding a correspondent bank takes time, and collection terms stretch out. An assessment published in August 2026 describes this as 'doing the trade but being unable to transfer the money for it', and counts petrochemicals, transport and truck fleets among the most exposed areas. On the insurance side there are two separate layers. The first is sanctions compliance: P&I clubs state plainly that cover cannot be provided for trade that breaches sanctions, and they expect detailed due diligence on the vessel and the parties. A voyage policy can therefore be left ineffective if it emerges later that a listed vessel or party was involved in the transaction. The second is war risk: after the attacks in the Black Sea, the premium on voyages to Ukrainian ports rose from about 0.4 percent of the vessel's value to 0.5 percent, and at Russia's Black Sea ports from 0.6 percent to a range of 0.65–0.8 percent. These rates are far below the levels at Hormuz, but where the contract does not state who bears them they are large enough to wipe out the margin on a single voyage.

On the documentation side, two separate regimes have to be satisfied at once. Since 2023 Türkiye has halted the transit through its territory to Russia of goods subject to Western sanctions; after 2024, export-side controls on product groups suitable for military use were also tightened. For the carrier this means that the buyer and end-user declaration, the customs tariff code match and the origin information are no longer sufficient on their own at customs; the same information is expected to be checked separately by the bank, the insurer and, where relevant, the line operator. Small inconsistencies between documents cause the goods to be held up not at the border but at the payment stage.

Routes: the Black Sea, road and the INSTC

Security conditions on the Black Sea lane remained tense throughout 2026. Empty tankers bound for Novorossiysk being struck by uncrewed surface vessels, and one ship taking damage some 80 miles off the Turkish coast and putting in at Sinop, showed that the risk is not confined to the area around the ports. Even so, attempts to establish commercial services continue: the Ro-Ro sailings between Trabzon and Novorossiysk, which began on 21 July 2026 with a nine-day delay on the plan, run every four days, and the vessel in use can carry 49 trucks and 30 light vehicles at a time. Because the road and Ro-Ro combination involves fewer parties than a container service, some shippers prefer it for the management of compliance risk.

The North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC), meanwhile, is a route much discussed politically but still small in volume. Traffic between Russia and Iran across the Caspian was reported to have risen by 68 percent in the first four months of 2026, reaching 2.2 million tonnes. On the container side the scale is far more limited: according to Russian Railways, container movements on the corridor rose from 7,200 to 11,000 units, roughly the single-voyage capacity of a mid-sized container ship. Moreover, the steps taken on construction of the Rasht–Astara railway, the corridor's missing link, were still at the signature and memorandum stage in 2026. The targeting of Iran's Bandar Abbas and Chabahar ports during the 2026 conflict further weakened the corridor's reliability and pushed some Central Asian countries towards the Middle Corridor, which leaves Iran out of the equation.

Three checks stand out when planning on these lanes. The first is screening the parties and the vessel: checking the ship, the operator, the buyer and the paying bank against current lists before loading is far cheaper than a correction made after the event. The second is settling the payment path before the route: if the validity period of the freight quotation is shorter than the time needed to find a correspondent bank, the quotation is not in practice binding. The third is naming the war risk premium in the contract: where the area, the ceiling and the party responsible are not written down, the premium remains a one-sided cost left with either the carrier or the shipper.

For the past three years the corridor debate has been conducted over maps. The Hormuz crisis of 2026 tested those maps under field conditions and made the distinction clear: for a shipper, the difference between routes that actually carry cargo and projects still at the memorandum stage means several weeks of transit time and thousands of dollars per container.

The India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) was announced at the G20 summit in September 2023 through a memorandum of understanding between India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the EU, France, Germany, Italy and the United States. In February 2024 an intergovernmental framework agreement focused on a logistics platform and a digital ecosystem was signed between India and the UAE. The Saudi Arabia–Israel rail link that would form the corridor's northern leg, however, has remained suspended because of regional political conditions. As of mid-2026 IMEC looks less like an integrated transport route than a cluster of bilateral agreements, data cables and energy projects; no binding construction timetable or financing commitment has been announced. The Hormuz crisis also made a weakness in the design visible: the corridor's eastern leg rested on Gulf ports lying behind the strait. When the strait closed, the route's starting point closed with it. For that reason, planners in 2026 are discussing shifting the route to ports outside the strait such as Fujairah, Sohar, Salalah and Duqm, and bringing the Oman–UAE link forward. The corridor's original claim was a transit time roughly 40 percent shorter than the Suez route; that claim has not yet been tested by a measurable service.

Rail: the line on the map and the track on the ground

The only line in the Gulf rail network that actually carries freight today is the UAE's Etihad Rail, which opened to freight traffic on 23 February 2023. The GCC railway, 2,177 kilometres in total, is advancing in pieces and has no single regional authority. On the 300-kilometre Hafeet Rail project that will connect the UAE and Oman, the joint venture was established in April 2024 and the freight agreements were signed in October 2025; the operator is planned to run seven trains a week with capacity for 276 containers. The 785-kilometre high-speed line between Riyadh and Doha was agreed in December 2025, but completion is projected at around six years. The target date for Saudi Arabia's 950-kilometre Landbridge project, which will connect the Red Sea to the Gulf, is 2034; on completion it is expected to cut the 22–24 hour road crossing to under ten hours.

In 2026, then, the freight carried by rail in the Gulf is still small next to what moves by road. It was trucks, not rail, that closed the gap during the crisis: DP World stated that since March 2026 it had moved 500,000 TEU over intra-Gulf road and rail corridors, with around 3,000 truck movements a day. This shows that capacity could be found but that it was expensive; carriage of a 40-foot container from Salalah to Dubai was quoted in the 3,000–5,000 dollar range, while normal port-area haulage from Jebel Ali was in the 200–400 dollar band.

Ports: the capacity is there, the geography is hard

On the port side the picture is more dynamic. Jebel Ali's throughput fell by 59.5 percent in the first half of 2026 to 3.1 million TEU, with the second-quarter decline reaching 90 percent. Ports outside the strait took up part of that gap: Sohar grew by 40 percent in the first half to 545,000 TEU and Salalah by 15 percent to 2.33 million TEU. Oman's three deep-water ports handled a combined 143 million tonnes of cargo in 2025. On the Red Sea side, Jeddah Islamic Port has capacity above 10 million TEU but its 2024 throughput was around 3 million TEU; King Abdullah Port likewise has some 5 million TEU of unused capacity. In May 2026 MSC launched a multimodal service between Europe and the Gulf that calls at Jeddah and King Abdullah Port and carries the cargo overland to King Abdulaziz Port in Dammam. CMA CGM, for its part, signed a 400 million dollar terminal investment with Asyad at Sohar.

The constraint here is not capacity but geography. Although the total unused capacity of the ports outside the strait appears to exceed 20 million TEU, the road distance from Salalah to Dubai is more than 1,700 kilometres and there is no rail connection. Khor Fakkan, by contrast, is 130 kilometres from Dubai and Sohar 230, both reachable on existing roads. How much of that substitute capacity is actually usable therefore depends less on the size of the port than on its distance to the hinterland.

From a Türkiye and Eastern Mediterranean perspective

For Türkiye the most concrete development of 2026 was the Development Road actually getting under way. The project, whose foundation was laid in Ankara on 29 July 2026, comprises a 1,200-kilometre railway and a parallel motorway running from the Al-Faw port in southern Iraq to the Turkish border, together with around 20 economic zones across 11 provinces; total investment was announced at 17 billion dollars, with Iraq, Türkiye, the UAE and Qatar as partners. Iraq's Ministry of Transport projects that on completion Türkiye's trade with the Gulf could rise from around 20 billion dollars to 30–40 billion dollars. This is a construction project, however; it has no cargo to carry in the short term. What is actually working today is the energy line and the existing ports. On 1 August 2026 a one-year agreement was signed between BOTAŞ and Iraq's SOMO and NOC, providing for 750,000 barrels a day through the Kirkuk–Ceyhan line; the previous actual flow was around 170,000 barrels. On the container side, Mersin grew by 11 percent in the first quarter of 2026 to about 500,000 TEU, standing out positively in a quarter when throughput across Türkiye contracted by 0.7 percent. The Middle Corridor, despite its growth rate, continues to be limited in scale: the TITR route across the Caspian carried 4.12 million tonnes and 77,000 TEU in 2025, against a 2029 target of 300,000 TEU. Transit time has come down from 28–32 days to 13–17 days, but these volumes are on the order of one week's capacity on a deep-sea mainline service.

For planning purposes the distinction can be drawn as follows: the assets carrying cargo today are the ports outside the strait, intra-Gulf road transport, the Kirkuk–Ceyhan line and the Eastern Mediterranean ports. Those expected to come into service in the medium term are Hafeet Rail and the UAE's expanding pipeline. Those that are long term and do not yet produce any carriage commitment are IMEC's rail leg, the Saudi Landbridge and the Development Road. When preparing a quotation, the name of a corridor should not in itself be treated as a service guarantee; transit commitments given without confirming a scheduled service, published capacity and border-crossing times can turn into maturity risk, particularly on letter-of-credit transactions.

Under normal conditions the Strait of Hormuz is the world's busiest energy passage. According to data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), an average of 20.9 million barrels a day of oil and oil products passed through the strait in the first half of 2025; that corresponds to about 20 percent of global oil consumption and roughly a quarter of all oil carried by sea. Over the same period 11.4 billion cubic feet a day of LNG, more than a fifth of global LNG trade, also left through this narrow passage. The International Energy Agency (IEA) gives a similar picture for 2025: around 20 million barrels a day and roughly a third of crude oil carried by sea. On the container side the figures are smaller in absolute terms but decisive regionally. Total container throughput of the Persian Gulf states is at a level of about 33 million TEU a year; within that, Jebel Ali alone handles around 15.5 million TEU a year, while Khalifa Port moved 6.6 million TEU in 2025. Although its share of global port throughput is around 3.5 percent, for a shipper sending goods to the Gulf or transhipping through it this lane was close to having no alternative.

The conflict that began on 28 February 2026 reversed this picture. Following navigation warnings from the Revolutionary Guards, traffic fell to almost zero within days; a partial reopening was attempted with the ceasefire of 8 April, but the strait closed again on 18 April. As of the end of August it is regarded as effectively closed. Lloyd's List Intelligence counted 114 transits in the week of 17–22 August; although that was a 30 percent increase on the previous week, it is far below the pre-crisis average of 85 transits a day. As of 28 August, 383 vessels were still waiting off berth. The striking of a tanker on 25 August by ordnance of unidentified origin sums up why commercial risk appetite has not returned despite the assessment by military authorities that the area had been 'cleared of mines'.

The real issue is not the premium but the cover itself

The increase in the war risk premium is the most tangible cost item of this crisis. Premiums for a Gulf transit, quoted before the crisis in a range of 0.1 to 0.25 percent of the vessel's value, had risen by June 2026 to 3–8 percent, that is 3–8 million dollars per voyage for a large tanker; in the escalation at the end of July some quotations reached the 7.5–10 percent range and an insurance cost of around 21 million dollars was cited for a 270,000-tonne tanker. The Joint War Committee of the Lloyd's Market broadened its high-risk area definition to cover the whole Persian Gulf. For a logistics operator, however, the critical point was not the level of the premium but the fact that for a period no cover could be obtained at all: as some insurers withdrew from the region, a reinsurance facility led by the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) came into play, set up initially at 20 billion dollars and later raised to 40 billion dollars; the US Treasury took half the risk and seven insurers, among them Chubb, AIG and Berkshire Hathaway, took the remainder. On 19 June 2026 a separate consortium led by Chubb was opened within Lloyd's, offering 200 million dollars of capacity each for hull, P&I and cargo. These measures made cover purchasable again, but they did not normalise its price; industry sources say that premiums will need a confirmed period of calm of at least two to four weeks before they ease.

On the container side, lines suspended sailings one after another in March 2026 and introduced surcharges. Hapag-Lloyd announced an emergency conflict surcharge of 1,500 dollars per 20-foot container for regional deliveries and CMA CGM one of 2,000 dollars; Maersk, MSC and Cosco suspended their Gulf operations or diverted their vessels to safe waters. On the tanker side, Gulf–China clean product freight rose to around 78 dollars a tonne in July; the five-year average was around 19 dollars, while the March peak had approached 140 dollars. The global container spot index, by contrast, did not deteriorate to the same degree: Drewry's World Container Index of 27 August 2026 closed at 4,473 dollars per 40-foot container, down 1 percent on the week; Shanghai–Rotterdam stood at 4,287 dollars and Shanghai–Genoa at 4,866 dollars. The shock, in other words, was concentrated in cargo moving into and out of the Gulf and fed through to global mainline trades only to a limited extent.

Alternatives: pipelines and ports outside the strait

The arithmetic of the pipelines is limited from the outset. Although Saudi Arabia's East–West line (Petroline) has a design capacity of 7 million barrels a day, its actual export capacity is around 4.5–5 million barrels a day because of the constraint at the Yanbu terminals; the IEA notes that the line was used at about 2 million barrels a day in 2025, leaving 3–5 million barrels of headroom. The UAE's Habshan–Fujairah (ADCOP) line has a capacity of 1.8 million barrels a day and carries around 1.1 million barrels; the headroom is about 700,000 barrels. Construction of the 3 billion dollar, 300-kilometre parallel line is roughly half complete and is expected to raise capacity to 3.6 million barrels by the middle of 2027. In total, the pipeline headroom that could be brought into use today is 3.5–5.5 million barrels a day, less than a quarter of the roughly 20 million barrels that pass through the strait.

Ports outside the strait responded faster on the container side, but they loaded the cost onto the cargo. Jebel Ali's throughput fell to 3.1 million TEU in the first half of 2026, a decline of 59.5 percent year on year; the second-quarter fall reached 90.1 percent and the port dropped from 10th to 32nd in the global rankings. At Khalifa Port the loss was at least 50 percent. Against that, Oman's port of Sohar grew by 40 percent in the first half to 545,000 TEU and Salalah by 15 percent to 2.33 million TEU; DP World stated that since March it had moved 500,000 TEU over intra-Gulf road and rail corridors with around 3,000 truck movements a day, and signed a 50-year agreement for a new terminal at Fujairah with a capacity of 2.5 million TEU. Overland substitution is not cheap, however: carriage of a 40-foot container from Salalah to Dubai was quoted in the 3,000–5,000 dollar range, while normal port-area haulage from Jebel Ali to the same region was in the 200–400 dollar band.

When planning

For Türkiye the most visible effect of the crisis was on the Ceyhan side. When Iraq's exports through the Gulf fell by more than 80 percent after February, Baghdad brought its Mediterranean outlet back into use: on 1 August 2026 a one-year agreement was signed between BOTAŞ and SOMO and NOC, providing for 750,000 barrels a day through the Kirkuk–Ceyhan line; the previous actual flow was around 170,000 barrels, while the line's capacity is about 1.5 million barrels. On the container side, Mersin grew by 11 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2026 to about 500,000 TEU; with throughput across Türkiye contracting by 0.7 percent, Mersin's divergence shows that part of the Middle East cargo flow is being reconfigured through the Eastern Mediterranean.

When planning on these lanes it is worth asking three questions separately. The first is whether the cover exists at all: if the contract does not state who bears the war risk premium and up to what level it is assumed, the premium on its own can undo the commercial logic of a voyage. The second is the assumption on which the transit time rests: for cargo that berths at a port outside the strait and continues overland, the real duration comes not from the vessel schedule but from the border crossing and truck capacity. The third is document and route consistency: when the load port changes, if the letter of credit terms, the origin and the route definition in the insurance policy are not updated along with it, payment can falter even when the goods reach their destination.

Ali Erdim, co-founder of Alpagu Logistics, was a guest on TV8.5's Business Time programme, where in an enjoyable interview he set out the details of the success achieved internationally with a young and dynamic team. Ali Erdim, who said that he entered the sector early after graduating by being accepted into the navy's logistics department and took his place in the maritime industry, said: "After a long period of work we decided to set up our own company, and together with Mehmet Pala, co-founder of Alpagu Logistics, we want to realise our young, dynamic and innovative dreams in the logistics sector."

Erdim, who said that they meet demand from all regions, above all the Middle East and Europe but also including Africa, the Americas, Canada and Australia, stated that their modes of transport are aligned with world standards and that as a company they operate under a dedicated transport insurance policy. In this way, he stressed, they provide customers not only with delivery of the goods but also with cover for material damage.

Explaining that the company has an expert, young and dynamic team of 29 people including its branches, Erdim said, "Success is not a result, for us it is a beginning", and stated that their corporate success is the outcome of accumulated knowledge from the past together with the high motivation of quality, expert colleagues. On the difficulties of the sector, Erdim said: "To our mind the difficulties of our sector are a privilege, because we know that until the goods being carried reach the hands of the buyer, all responsibility rests with us."

Mehmet Pala, co-founder of Alpagu Logistics, stressed that the logistics sector holds an important place in economic development and could be the locomotive of the economy in 2022. Pala said that, beyond being perceived most of the time as a haulage business, logistics is in fact a more holistic management of processes. He explained: "Considered commercially, logistics is the tracking of all the processes from the point where a product is made through to its delivery to the end user."

Drawing attention to Türkiye's role as a bridge between the continents of Europe and Asia, Pala said that its geostrategic position has made the country an important transport and logistics hub. He stated that although the country's logistics sector is relatively young it is developing rapidly, and that Türkiye's success in this field during the pandemic showed the economic importance of the sector.

Pala said: "With the improvements to be made, the logistics sector can be the most important locomotive of the Turkish economy." Noting that factors such as a strategic approach, planning for the future, flexibility and adaptability gained importance in the logistics sector during the pandemic, Pala explained that at Alpagu Logistics they see it as their mission to bring about a golden age for Türkiye in the logistics sector.

Ali Erdim, co-founder of Alpagu Logistics, described the container shortage in the logistics sector — a sector whose importance has come to be better understood with the pandemic — and the ways towards a solution.

The pandemic made the importance of the sector better understood

The pandemic, which took hold of the world in a short time, gave us new habits. It also brought into view a sector that had always been there but whose importance we had not grasped: logistics. In this period we came to understand how much the logistics sector matters, particularly alongside the vaccines.

In the first days we went beyond our standard shopping and bought and stockpiled goods in bulk. As a result we saw supermarket shelves empty for a short while. The reason was never that there was not enough stock in our country; it was simply that the whole world was not ready to meet consumption this fast and this unfamiliar.

The empty container problem is being used as strategic leverage

From the last quarter of 2020, empty containers — which caused a major crisis in world trade and became steadily harder to source — began to be used as strategic leverage between countries. While China collected empty containers, the United States imposed a condition of buying goods from its own country.

Once China-US freight rates rose to the level of 8-14 thousand dollars, no shipowner any longer had eyes for the 50-100 dollar empty container charge payable to the port. That gave rise to a single perception: send all the containers to China. Countries with medium-sized exports and imports ran into equipment problems, and the domestic freight market suddenly rose to between two and five times its level.

In the short term Ro-Ro and bulk cargo transport can be an alternative; in the long term, as a country we need to bring in an incentive mechanism for a strong fleet and for container manufacturing.

Support for youth employment matters

In this difficult and troubled period our company, with the great contributions of Board Member Mehmet Pala and of my colleagues, has continued to grow through the pandemic while also opening its door to young and inexperienced colleagues, supporting youth employment in the country's economy.

The potential of İzmir and Aliağa

For İzmir to become a logistics and container hub, the fact that the port of Aliağa is Türkiye's third largest and newly renovated port should be taken into account. When we consider the yearly increase in the handling capacity of the ports of İzmir Alsancak and Aliağa, we can see that business people from the Marmara region are investing in this area as well.

It would be entirely wrong to explain the logistics sector's status as a key sector through containers alone. Unless teleportation exists, we should not forget that at every level of this logistics network, from the courier to the ship's master, there is somebody's labour.