Российский Суэцкий канал

The Venta is a big, new, pricey, ice-class vessel owned by Danish shipping giant Maersk — and it is the world’s first container ship to attempt the Northern Sea Route, the fabled Northeast Passage that runs from the edge of Alaska to the top of Scandinavia along Russia’s desolate Siberian coastline. Maritime transit is now possible between July and October because of the rapid and, to many, deeply unsettling retreat of Arctic sea ice due to profound climate change, a trend that is amplified at the North and South poles. Russia, China and commercial shipping interests are among those with high hopes that the Northern Sea Route could become a melt-season alternative to Egypt’s Suez Canal, trim weeks off transit times and slash fuel costs for vessels shuttling between ports in Europe and Asia — and the Americas. The Russian company Rosatom, which runs the largest ­nuclear-powered ice-breaking fleet in the world, boasts that the route has “no queues and no pirates,” an allusion to the threat posed by African buccaneers in the Gulf of Aden in recent years.

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