nCa Report
On a crisp November morning in Moscow, members of the Russian Academy of Sciences gathered to discuss what many had considered a relic of Soviet hubris: the possibility of redirecting Siberian rivers thousands of kilometers south to the parched lands of Central Asia.
The proposal, announced on November 14th, represents the latest resurrection of an idea that has haunted the region for more than a century—a grand engineering scheme that promises salvation to some and ecological catastrophe to others.
The project, if realized, would involve constructing a closed pipeline system to transport water from the Ob River basin across more than 2,000 kilometers of rugged terrain to countries facing acute water shortages, particularly Uzbekistan.
Unlike the Soviet-era vision of open canals, this iteration speaks the language of modern engineering: polymer pipes, precision calculations, and a price tag approaching $100 billion. Yet beneath the technical specifications lies a familiar question: Can humanity bend nature to its will without breaking something essential?
A Dream Deferred
The genesis of this ambition reaches back to 1868, when a young Ukrainian gymnasium student named Yakov Demchenko sketched in his school notebook a plan to redirect the Ob and Irtysh rivers toward the Aral Sea. It was the kind of audacious thinking that captures youthful imagination—water flowing where it’s needed, deserts blooming, prosperity spreading across the steppes.
The Russian Empire had other concerns, and Demchenko’s vision gathered dust.
The idea remained dormant until 1948, when renowned geologist Vladimir Obruchev wrote to Stalin about harnessing Siberian rivers to cultivate Central Asia’s arid lands. The letter received no response. But by the late 1960s, as Soviet cotton production soared and water demands intensified, the project gained official traction. The State Planning Committee, the Academy of Sciences, and the Ministry of Water Resources mobilized. In 1970, it became a state priority, with plans to transfer up to 25 cubic kilometers of water annually.
For nearly two decades, the project consumed resources and imagination.
More than 160 organizations across the USSR contributed to the effort, producing 50 volumes of technical documentation and 10 albums of maps and blueprints. Construction began on supporting infrastructure, including the Irtysh-Karaganda canal, which still operates today, quietly vindicating at least one fragment of the grand design. The main channel was envisioned to span more than 2,500 kilometers with a capacity exceeding 1,000 cubic meters per second—a river made by human hands.
Then, in 1986, it all stopped. The Political Bureau issued a resolution titled “On the Cessation of the Work on the Partial Flow Transfer of Northern and Siberian Rivers.”
Economic pressures mounted, scientific opposition grew louder, and the environmental risks became impossible to ignore. Experts warned of massive flooding, disrupted groundwater systems, damaged fish populations, displaced Indigenous communities, and unpredictable impacts on permafrost and regional climate. The project that would have remade Central Asia instead remade nothing at all.
The Crisis Deepens
But the water didn’t stop disappearing. In the decades since the project’s cancellation, Central Asia’s water crisis has transformed from a manageable problem into an existential threat.
The glaciers of the Tien Shan and Pamir mountains—the region’s water towers—have shrunk by more than a quarter since the 1990s. Meanwhile, the population has surged to approximately 80 million people, nearly 50 percent higher than in the early 1990s.
The region’s agricultural systems remain trapped in Soviet-era inefficiency. Irrigation networks waste up to half the water they use annually through evaporation and seepage from deteriorating canals.
Rivers in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have lost between 40 and 70 percent of their flow. In downstream areas, what remains is often too saline for drinking or farming.
Roughly 13 percent of the region’s population—more than 10 million people—lacks access to safe drinking water.
The Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest lake, has become a haunting emblem of environmental collapse. Soviet engineers diverted its tributary rivers to irrigate cotton fields, and the sea responded by vanishing. By 2014, satellite imagery confirmed that the eastern basin had completely dried up, transforming into the Aralkum Desert. Former fishing ports now sit 30 to 90 kilometers from water. Rusting boats litter salt-crusted plains where men once hauled nets heavy with fish.
The region’s climate has turned more extreme—winters colder, summers hotter—and toxic dust storms carry salt and pesticide residues across thousands of kilometers, affecting air quality from Tehran to Dushanbe.
New Pressures, Old Ideas
The situation has grown more complicated with Afghanistan’s construction of the Qosh Tepa Canal, a Taliban-backed project that may divert up to 10 cubic kilometers of water annually from the Amu Darya River.
By late 2024, the canal was more than 80 percent complete, stretching 206 kilometers across northern Afghanistan with plans to ultimately span 285 kilometers. The project promises food self-sufficiency for Afghanistan, which has never fully utilized its share of the Amu Darya’s waters.
But for downstream Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the canal represents potential repercussions.
Afghanistan is not a party to existing Central Asian water-sharing agreements forged during the Soviet era. Without international oversight or formal dispute mechanisms, the canal’s completion threatens to ignite conflicts that could spread beyond the region. Some observers have called it “the final nail in the coffin” for the Aral Sea basin.
Against this backdrop, the Russian Academy’s renewed interest in Siberian river diversion appears less like historical nostalgia and more like a potential lifeline—or at least, that’s how proponents frame it. Academician Robert Nigmatulin argued at the November gathering that the project would address Central Asia’s water deficit while alleviating flooding problems in Siberia, where excess water inundates cities and complicates oil extraction in the Ob River valley.
The proposal calls for diverting between 20 and 70 cubic kilometers per year—a fraction of Siberia’s 3,000 cubic kilometer annual flow.
A Geopolitical Calculus
The motivations extend beyond hydrology. Some Russian analysts see the project as a tool for maintaining influence in Central Asia, and generating revenue through water exports—transforming water into what some have called “the new oil.”
Yet skepticism runs deep. Mikhail Bolgov, a specialist in flooding and water resource management at the Russian Academy of Sciences, expressed doubt that the project would advance soon, citing not only the enormous costs but also the loss of the original Soviet-era calculations and technical documentation.
Ecological concerns persist: even diverting 5 to 7 percent of the Ob’s flow could trigger long-lasting climate changes in the Arctic and beyond, according to environmental experts. The river’s reduced flow into the Arctic Ocean might alter ocean currents, ice formation, and regional temperature patterns in ways that remain poorly understood.
Others question whether Russia itself would benefit. Many Russian regions, particularly in the south, already face water shortages exacerbated by droughts and wildfires. Some argue that domestic needs should take priority over exports, and that Central Asian states should first modernize their irrigation systems rather than seeking external water supplies.
The political will to spend tens of billions of dollars on infrastructure that primarily benefits other countries remains uncertain, especially while Russia’s resources are strained by ongoing conflicts.
The Ghost of Projects Past
The Irtysh-Karaganda canal, completed in the 1970s as part of the original Soviet project, offers an instructive case study. Spanning 460 kilometers, it has operated successfully for decades without triggering the environmental disasters that critics predicted.
The canal supplies water to Kazakhstan’s Karaganda region and, since 2000, to Astana, demonstrating that large-scale water transfer can work. Supporters point to other examples: China’s South-North Water Transfer Project, which moves water from the Yangtze River to the Yellow River basin, or the Central Arizona Project, which carries Colorado River water 500 kilometers across the American Southwest.
Yet these comparisons omit crucial differences. The proposed Ob-to-Central Asia pipeline would cross international borders, requiring coordination among nations with competing interests and limited trust. The Soviet Union could impose projects by fiat; post-Soviet states must negotiate. And the environmental stakes have escalated—climate change amplifies risks and uncertainties that were barely understood in the 1970s.
Central Asian leaders have responded with cautious interest. In March 2024, Marat Imankulov, Secretary of Kyrgyzstan’s Security Council, suggested reconsidering the project’s relevance, arguing that modern technologies like closed pipeline systems could address earlier concerns about water loss and ecological damage.
Kazakhstan, which assumed the chairmanship of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea in 2024, has proposed using that platform to facilitate regional discussions, including potentially bringing Afghanistan into the conversation.
But Victor Danilov-Danilyan, scientific director of the Institute of Water Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences, noted that the project lacks urgency. He argued that Russia should prioritize redirecting water from the Pechora and Northern Dvina rivers to its own water-stressed southern regions via the Volga basin before considering exports to Central Asia.
The suggestion reveals an uncomfortable truth: Russia faces its own water challenges, and domestic constituencies may resist seeing resources flow abroad.
An Uncertain Future
For now, the project remains in the realm of feasibility studies and academic discussions. The Russian Academy has called on the Ministry of Science and Higher Education to include comprehensive research in the state plan, but actual funding and political commitment remain uncertain.
Most analysts agree that significant progress is unlikely before Russia’s involvement in Ukraine concludes and economic conditions stabilize. The necessary capital—potentially $100 billion or more—far exceeds current budgets, and foreign investment seems improbable given geopolitical tensions.
Meanwhile, the water crisis continues to worsen. Some Russian experts warn that if Moscow fails to act, millions of water-stressed Central Asians may migrate northward into Russia, fundamentally altering the country’s demographic composition, particularly east of the Urals. The threat of climate-induced migration adds urgency to what might otherwise be dismissed as an engineering fantasy.
The paradox is that both action and inaction carry profound risks.
Building the pipeline could trigger ecological changes that cascade across continents, from the Arctic Ocean to the Central Asian steppes. Not building it could condemn tens of millions to deepening water scarcity, failed harvests, and the social instability that follows. The Soviet Union’s greatest engineering projects were often monuments to ambition untethered from consequence. This revival asks whether a wiser generation can succeed where its predecessors failed—or whether some problems simply have no good solutions.
In the dried seabed of the Aral Sea, where fishing boats rust in the sand and dust storms carry toxic memories across the land, the question feels especially urgent. The rivers that might save Central Asia flow thousands of kilometers away, indifferent to borders and human need.
Whether they will ever flow south depends not on engineering alone, but on the fragile possibility of cooperation among nations that share a crisis. /// nCa, 9 December 2025