Monitoring the Belarusian Railway: Freight Transport Over Ten Months

The psychology of a normal, healthy person is such that constantly recurring events and phenomena become routine, and then cease to be noticed altogether. The exception: repulsive and egregious irritants. Those that defy comprehension. With such matters, the Lukashenka regime excels “like a champion”… The Belarusian Railway, accordingly, also strives to maintain this “trend line.”

We have repeatedly drawn attention to the formalism and abysmal quality of the content presented on the official Belarusian Railway website (for example, here). But it is impossible to “pass by” all the time. The railway has “from time immemorial” deservedly been considered and remains a worthy, respected, and serious sphere of activity, and “railway worker” has always sounded proud. Alas, not now, in Belarus…

This is to say that the information in the news section (we are not yet addressing others) on the official website should be at a minimum interesting to cargo owners and other participants in railway transport, and ideally useful. This is the case on absolutely all official websites of railway companies throughout the world. Even the Russian Railways website nearly keeps pace in this regard. But not the Belarusian Railway, where over ten months there is absolutely nothing useful among the news items. Except perhaps boasting about passenger transport.

And the most important thing that the Belarusian Railway can and must offer, especially while declaring from all “platforms” its client orientation, is to present reliable and comprehensible information about its capabilities, problems, and indicators of decline or growth. This allows business, as a more flexible entity, to navigate the situation and adapt, bringing both cargo and money into the common national “treasury.”

However, the simplest figures and performance indicators of the Belarusian Railway are now “classified.” And not without reason. Representatives of the regime “tremble” in fear before it and the people to reveal even the slightest reality (we are not even talking about politics), since much in the economy is done contrary to common sense. After all, the regime's motives are to retain and strengthen itself.

Ultimately, our information resource is forced, with the help of conscientious and desperate Belarusians, to “extract” even elementary information about transport volumes in order to somehow assist business and society. Which is what we are attempting a bit today*.

According to operational data from the Belarusian Railway for the ten months of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022, freight transported totaled approximately 82 million tonnes, or 96% (up ↑ 1% compared to the results for eight months of 2023), including:

import – 10 million tonnes, or 90% (down ↓ 1%);
export – 30 million tonnes, or 115% (down ↓ 2%);
transit – 12 million tonnes, or 62% (down ↓ 1%);
domestic (intra-republic) – 30 million tonnes, or 102% (up ↑ 1%).

As can be seen, not everything is so wonderful at the Belarusian Railway. And the stabilization and development recently declared in a “convincing” tone at a meeting with the so-called president, in the government, and at a joint session in parliament are in reality an overall failure compared to last year, not to mention the past “five-year plan.”

However, the “trend” of accelerated sell-off of the national product remains on the rise. After all, under conditions of minimal or absent margin (profitability) in foreign trade via Russian delivery routes (much has been said and repeated about this here on the site), the illegitimate regime needs to sell goods as quickly and in as large quantities as possible to replenish and preserve resources for punitive agencies and measures.

Well, elementary statistics will undoubtedly continue to be concealed. And they will tell us “news” about the next “title”: “Belarusian Railway congratulated the 50-millionth passenger of 2023” (either to itself or to a specially selected passenger), or “There are 50 million tonnes of freight!”, “On September 5, the Belarusian Railway began transporting sugar beet from the 2023 harvest.” This is about transport over the last two months… There is nothing even to add. But there is more about agriculture: “Agricultural organizations of the Belarusian Railway have completed the sowing of winter crops.” We will not continue; further on there are only all kinds of forums, rallies, public and collective events, and “full-blown” propaganda.

A very “respectable” website the Belarusian Railway now has…

* Not everything can be published immediately, observing a moratorium for the safety of sources. We constantly write about this and, so as not to bore readers with this forced but unchanging phrase under conditions of lawlessness in Belarus, we place it in a note.