Donbass will travel in Russian style – Newspaper Kommersant No. 214 (7415) dated 11/18/2022

The Ministry of Transport intends to “integrate” the main highways of the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions into the federal network, follows from the published draft government decree. The department, in particular, will operate and maintain roads linking Lugansk, Donetsk and Mariupol, Kantemirovka and Lugansk, Mariupol and Melitopol. Two existing federal highways will be extended to the territory of new regions, one of them will be called Novorossiya. The transfer will take place in two stages, “given the situation in the framework of a special military operation.” The federal road network will thus increase by more than 2.5 thousand km.

The Ministry of Transport published on regulation.gov.ru a draft amendment to the “list of public roads of federal significance”, approved by government decree No. 928. It is supplemented by new routes, which pass through the territory of the DPR, LPR, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, and are assigned Russian indices. Thus, the highway Belgorod-Starobelsk-Lugansk-Donetsk-Mariupol will have the index P-150, the highway M-4 Kantemirovka-Lugansk – A-258. The existing federal road A-260 Volgograd-LPR border is being extended to Lugansk; highway A-280 Rostov-on-Don-Taganrog-border with the DPR – to Mariupol, Melitopol and Simferopol. The index of the latter is changing to R-280 (the change of the letter from A to R means that it connects the capitals of the regions), it will have its own name – “Novorossiya”. Responsible for the roads will be two federal state institutions (FKU) of Rosavtodor – FKU “DSD Center” and FKU “Uprdor” Taman “”. Let us recall that the Crimean Bridge is under the jurisdiction of the latter.

The need to supplement the list arose in connection with the acceptance of new territories into the Russian Federation, according to the explanatory note of the Ministry of Transport to the project, they need to be “integrated” into the Russian road network. It should be noted that on the territory of the mentioned regions there are also a large number of regional roads that do not change their status (for example, from Melitopol to Kherson).

In total, according to the published plan, the federal road network will increase by more than 2.5 thousand km (now it includes 60 thousand km), including 463 km of regional roads of the Crimea, Voronezh, Rostov, Belgorod regions, which lead to new territories. The change in status means that Rosavtodor undertakes to repair and maintain highways in accordance with certain standards, which were determined by the White House in 2017 (the funding allocated for this depends on the category of the road).

The Ministry of Transport proposes to change ownership in two stages, “taking into account the situation in the territories as part of a special military operation.”

• At the first stage, 1.3 thousand km of road sections will become federal, including a section of the new R-150 road from Belgorod.
• At the second stage, the Ministry of Transport is going to make the Donetsk-Zaporozhye, Melitopol-Zaporozhye-border with Ukraine (in the Zaporozhye region) and M-4 Novoshakhtinsk-Slavyansk-border with Ukraine highways (in the LPR and DPR) “federal” roads. These roads currently pass through territories not controlled by the Russian Federation, a note was made in the draft resolution.

Public discussion of the document will last until December 1. So far, judging by the statements made earlier by Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin, local highways will be repaired by the state company Avtodor (its subsidiary, Avtodor-Project Management, is doing this). By the end of the year, the state-owned company will complete the repair and reconstruction of more than 500 km of roads, restore 20 bridges, Avtodor head Vyacheslav Petushenko said on Thursday. Subsequently, the routes will be transferred to Rosavtodor, follows from the logic of the draft resolution. In 2023-2025, the government is going to repair another 2.4 thousand km of roads and 56 bridges in new regions.

Ivan Buranov