A line of trucks five kilometres (three miles) long stretches along Kazakhstan’s Oral-Samara road from the entrance to the Syrym border crossing with Russia.

“Nothing unusual,” reassures a sergeant of the Kazakh National Security Committee (KNB), the body that manages the border point. But local media observers and transport operators very much disagree. Since early September, they have been raising the alarm over complications causing highly unusual backups extending far from the border. Making matters worse, nobody seems quite clear on exactly what is causing the jams to become so extraordinarily big.

By late October, there were reports that nearly 10,000 trucks were stuck at the Kazakhstan-Russia border, waiting for customs clearance to continue their journey. The losses on cargo amount to millions of dollars, while the costs of hauling goods between the two countries have been driven up.

In Oral (also known as Uralsk), the capital of West Kazakhstan Oblast that is located nearly 70 km from the border, a goods warehouse company representative tells how the truck jams are not dissolving: “Usually, a truck [arriving for a crossing] crosses the border on either side within four to five hours. Currently, it can take several days.”

“It seems to be a political issue,” he adds.

According to Time Saving Machine, a platform that brings together offers from carriers and logistics companies for the delivery of goods abroad, there is no doubt that the issue of sanctions is a key factor in causing the congestion. A huge number of cargo trucks travelling from China have been refused permission to cross the border, the site said.

“Since mid-September, Kazakh customs services have been checking almost all goods destined for Russia, in particular to verify any presence of sanctioned products and dual-use goods [that can be used by both civilian and military producers],” wrote Russian media outlet Okno.

Since the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine in early 2022, Kazakhstan has increasingly established itself both as an essential transit route for East-West hauliers looking to avoid Russian routes to the north and as an unofficial re-export route via which Russia can circumvent sanctions on shipped goods.

The second of these distinctions has troubled Western capitals ever since the illicit trade facilitation took shape and Astana has come under rising pressure from Europe and the US to crack down on the sanctions evasion. This month, the EU’s Special Envoy for Sanctions, David O'Sullivan, will visit Kazakh capital Astana and other capitals in Central Asia.

The border crossing in the vicinity of Oral, in the far northwest of Kazakhstan, is important to goods flows heading to Russian population centres including Moscow (Credit: CIA, public domain).

Disagreements over how to run customs operations between Kazakh border officials and Russian counterparts also appear to have contributed to the generation of massive truck back-ups.

“There have been cases where Russian customs officers have tried to bring in electronic devices, but our customs officers have stopped them. Today, there are no more problems in this regard," says a representative of highway management body KazAvtoZhol, who attended the 21st Kazakhstan-Russia Interregional Cooperation Forum held in Oral on November 11-12, referring to the bilateral signing of a memorandum on the development of road border checkpoints.

According to the Okno media outlet, Russia has also been “tightening controls on imports transiting through Kazakhstan”. Participants in the interregional forum talk about how the issue was raised during the event’s plenary session, sparking some back and forth between the two sides. But several of the participants add that the topic remains “a purely technical issue”. They reject outright any linkage to Western sanctions, saying they were never mentioned.

During an intergovernmental commission on transport at the forum, the Kazakh side also raised the issue of difficulties encountered by Kazakh road hauliers due to changes this year in tightened Russian immigration legislation.

A driver in his truck cab recalls how at the Syrym border crossing, “in September and October, several trucks coming from Almaty were refused entry by Russian customs. They stayed for several days and finally turned back”.

Several drivers say this incident was caused by changes in VAT legislation. Some Kyrgyz media have reported that previously unheard of Russian demands at the border for proof of VAT payments ahead of delivery are one aspect of the truck back-ups, the financial impacts of which have started to cause the closure of sewing shops that are part of Kyrgystan’s garment-making industry.

“The problem of truck delays at the Russian-Kazakh border will soon be resolved,” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Vitaly Savelyev said in an interview with Rossiya-1 on November 13. The issue, he added, was discussed during Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's November 11-12 state visit to Russia, which coincided with the Oral forum.

"There have been some difficulties with the transport of goods, particularly with customs clearance. But I think everything will be sorted out soon,” Savelyev also remarked.

Since November 1, Russia, under a temporary measure, has been permitting trucks carrying goods from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to cross the border in line with an emergency decree issued by Vladimir Putin authorising the import by land of goods irregularly cleared through customs.

Yet the truck jams persist.

One theory in circulation is that Russia is less bothered by flows on its border with Kazakhstan as it has shifted the importation of many goods from China to Russian-Chinese and Russian-Mongolia border points (Credit: Emma Collet).

Tamara Esmailova, editor-in-chief of independent regional newspaper Uralskaya Nedelya, has a theory that the main difficulty lies in Russia's halting of the transit of goods from Kazakhstan after the discovery of a smuggling network in Khorgos, the location of a major “Eurasian Land Bridge” trade and logistics hub, including a dry port and special economic zone, on the Chinese-Kazakh border.

“To combat this mafia and parallel imports into its territory, Russia started importing goods from China bypassing Kazakhstan, via Mongolia and border crossings with China,” says the journalist.

An investigation by media outlet Orda determined that chaos, on both the Kazakhstan-Russia and Kazakhstan-China borders, began after the September 4-5 Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) intergovernmental summit. Until 2022, the border was controlled by the KNB and companies belonging to Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev clan, but the change of ruling regime in Astana after the events of “Bloody January” 2022 gave rise to new smuggling rings who are trying to circumvent sanctions through parallel transit, corruption and false documents, writes Orda.

Whatever the explanation for the hellish truck queues, the issue is a thorn in the side of Russian-Kazakh relations, especially given that Tokayev and Putin have agreed to gradually expand the capacity of North-South transport corridors.

Both Russia and Central Asia have ambitions to reach South Asian markets, most particularly Pakistan and India, via new infrastructure running through Afghanistan and Iran. But if Astana and Moscow fail to even resolve the nightmarish snarl-ups on Russia’s border with Kazakhstan, the chances of effective cooperation in realising such already highly challenging aims could begin to seem fanciful.