russia Is Ready to Turn Siberia into a Desert for the Sake of Water Blackmail in Central Asia

russia’s academy of sciences has resumed work on a large-scale infrastructure project that involves the partial transfer of water resources from the Ob River to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The initiative is presented as a tool to “stabilize water supply in southern russia”, but in reality it is a modernized version of the soviet plan to “redirect Siberian rivers”. That project was abandoned in 1986 due to high and unpredictable environmental risks.

moscow seeks to reorient its influence in Central Asia, where its traditional levers, first of all gas blackmail, no longer work. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are gas exporters focused primarily on the Chinese market, while the region’s economy increasingly relies on Chinese and Western capital. In these conditions, russia counts on “water diplomacy”, effectively creating a new instrument of political pressure on post-soviet countries.

Financial estimates underscore the scale of the project: according to preliminary calculations, the cost of the project will start at $100 billion. But the strategic costs will be much higher if environmental consequences are taken into account. The reorientation of water flows could cause desertification in some areas and waterlogging in others, destabilize hydrological systems, and speed up the melting of Arctic glaciers. Disruption of the water balance in Siberia could trigger large-scale climate shifts across most of Eurasia.