Building of highway to connect Vladivostok and St. Petersburg continues

On Friday the Russian Transport Ministry Committee headed by First Deputy Minister Igor Slunyaev will set to controlling the construction of the federal Amur highway to connect Vladivostok /an administrative centre in the Far East/ and St. Petersburg at the section "Chita-Khabarovsk" in the Amur region /Far East/.

Building of the Amur federal highway is personally controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Opening of an end-to-end traffic there is scheduled for the end of 2003.

Another 89 bridges are yet to be built on the future highway, which is 2,165 kilometres long.

The new highway will extend the current federal highway, "Vladivostok-Khabarovsk". This, in its turn, will allow opening an end-to-end two-way traffic from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg.

A meeting with participation of Russian Transport Minister Sergey Frank and Russian presidential plenipotentiary in the Far Eastern federal district Konstantin Pulikovsky, which is scheduled to take place on May 17th in Khabarovsk, will be devoted to the problems of the Amur highway.

According to the Far Eastern plenipotentiary's press service, the Amur highway will not only allow integrating the Far East into the country's single transport system, but including Russia in general in the system of the world transport communication.

In the future the Amur highway will become a big part of the transcontinental Eurasian transport corridor, "Paris-Berlin-Moscow-Vladivostok", Konstantin Pulikovsky believes.