March 31, 2013. The construction of the high-speed links connecting Moscow with Saint Petersburg and with Yekaterinburg might start in 2013-2028, depending on the state of the Russian economy, a report on Russia’s long-term socioeconomic development uploaded on the Ministry for Economic Development’s website states.

The long-term forecast on the transportation sector development in 2013-2030 was presented in three versions: the innovations-focused one, the conservative one, and the accelerated one.

Under the innovations-focused option, the industry will receive 4.3 trillion RUR worth of investments, with the total amount reaching 8.7 trillion RUR by 2030. This means that the high-speed Moscow-Saint Petersburg link (which costs 1,204bn RUR to build) will have been finished by 2018 and the Moscow-Yekaterinburg one (which costs 1,530bn RUR to construct) will be completed in 2020-2030.

The conservative version presupposes ‘a relatively insufficient investment flow’: by 2020, the industry will have received 2.6 trillion RUR worth of investments, and by 2030 the figure will have come to 6.5 trillion RUR. In this case the construction of the two high-speed links might be completed ten to twenty years later.