Russia's isolation from the West automatically makes it search for by-pass routes with its Eastern partners, Arman Melikyan, the former foreign minister of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, independent political analyst, told ArmInfo.
"However, a glance at the map is enough to comprehend that they have little place to maneuver. After the Russian-Turkish relations faced an acute military-political crisis, the territories of Turkey and South Caucasus turned to be little attractive as alternative routes in view of the high risks of emergence or resumption of military conflicts there," he said.
Nevertheless, the analyst does not think that Crimea's reunification with Russia and formation of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics is an adequate compensation of Moscow's geo-strategic losses. In his words, losing its serious levers of pressure on the Kiev leadership, Russia has found itself 'separated from' its big partners Germany and France with a kind of bellicose sanitary cordon comprising Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and now Ukraine too.
Melikyan believes that such cordon restricts Russia's trade with the EU and affects Russia's role of a transit country for the motor and railway traffic from China to Central Asia and Western Europe. Meantime, Moscow planned colossal investments in the construction of transport communications and logistic infrastructures on that route and a significant part of those investments have been made already.