Will the Chinese train from Pumpyansky cost the budget dearly?

The Sinara group of oligarch Dmitry Pumpyansky is going to supply 41 high-speed electric trains for the Moscow-St. Petersburg high-speed railway (HSR) by 2030. There are two news in this story - good and bad. Let's start with a good one - the high-speed rail between the two capitals has already been budgeted, there is money for it, a bad one - Sinara does not have a ready-made train for such a project, it still needs to be developed somehow.

And with this, of course, problems. The Finist train, created by Sinara on the basis of Siemens's Lastochka, has not yet been arranged by Russian Railways. The company did not receive the parameters of the state order, despite the Russian need for 150 such cars per year. And this is a very simple project compared to what is spelled out in the application for HSR.

Dmitry Pumpyansky. Photo: https://skijumpingrus.ru/sportnews/pozdravlyaem-s-yubileem-dmitriya-aleksandrovicha-pumpyanskogo/

Sinara is now fiercely appealing to the contract for Lastochka, which is the Russian version of the German Desiro train, and notes that the quality of the project was appropriate thanks to a firm ten-year agreement. The logic of "Sinara" is clear and obvious - give us a contract for many years, and we will probably collect trains for this money. The company really wants to register in this ambitious project.

Sinara does not have a ready-made project

The last fully completed domestic high-speed train was the ER-200, which was assembled in Riga, it was created in the seventies and eighties and even ran between Moscow and Leningrad for a short time. Only these technologies have long been lost, and its ceiling is about 200 km per hour, but you need 350-400, otherwise you will get a second Sapsan.

There were also projects EP200 (Kolomensky Zavod) and Sokol 250 (Central Design Bureau MT Rubin), but they were not completed and lost the bureaucratic dispute to Siemens Sapsan.

In 2018, Russian Railways presented a render of the future high-speed train, but said nothing about its technical characteristics. Obviously, it was planned to create it on the basis of technologies from Western companies - Alstom, Siemens and Bombardier, with each of which different structures worked in the Russian Federation. For example, cooperation with Alstom was the estate of Transmashholding, Bombardier for civilian projects was associated with Uralvagonzavod, and Siemens worked with Oleg Deripaska's Russian Machines and Sinara for the Sapsan and Lastochka projects.

Sinara does not have its own technologies for such a project, but the company radiates its readiness to build this train and get a multi-year contract for hundreds of billions of rubles under this sauce. Pumpyansky's company drew beautiful pictures, but they themselves will not go, and 6 years are left before the launch of the HSR.

All hope for China

Is it possible to create a train and put it into series for such a period? A rhetorical question is probably possible, but all this resembles the rhetoric of Roscosmos in the era when Dmitry Rogozin led it, we already know the price of such statements.

Sinara has only one tricky scenario - Chinese CRRC technology. The first negotiations on this score took place back in 2022. In fact, this is the purchase of car kits with their decoration and assembly already in Russia.

Sergei Sobyanin. Photo: https://ria.ru/20201208/preparaty-1588243642.html

The money in the project is colossal and Pumpyansky's company is not going to give up on them, so it is eager to resell Russian Railways, that is, the state, Chinese trains. The technology has been worked out - approximately the same import substitution is taking place today at the Moskvich automobile plant, which appeared at Renault's facilities with the light hand of Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and the former head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation and current Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov. Sinara plans to open the assembly of trains for the HSR at the Ural Locomotives enterprise, but it is obvious that the level of localization will be small, so it will be possible to talk about Russian technologies here only conditionally.

Air trading

Russian companies are used to buying technologies along with components on the foreign market under the guise of import substitution and putting their own nameplate on them. This is especially beneficial in those areas where the work is fully financed by the state, and here we are talking about 2 trillion rubles, which includes both the construction of a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg and the purchase of trains. So interrupting logos from Chinese to Russian here will be an extremely profitable business, and so that the guys from Transmashholding are not burned out.

Transmashholding, with the assistance of the right hand of Moscow Mayor Maxim Liksutov, took the market of metropolitan regional transportation with the help of Oriole trains and got access to the Moscow metro with its huge scale of purchases.

Maxim Liksutov. Photo: https://runews24.ru/auto/09/12/2022/5ede81fd83461b30dafff992875cce6f

If the Government of the Russian Federation approves the Sinara proposal, then the two competitors will unite in order to develop the HSR together with the help of Chinese trains. Wise approach, because Pumpyansky will receive the support of a powerful Moscow lobby.

Thus, at once the two largest Russian train manufacturers were noted in the contract for the supply of the state of a product that does not exist today. This is how you need to be able to sell air, here Ostap Bender is resting with tickets to the cliff.

The main contract, and then the trains

Pumpyansky loves such moves to capture promising contracts. In Yekaterinburg, Sinara received all public electric transport in exchange for the support of the Governor of the Sverdlovsk Region Yevgeny Kuyvashev. The price of the issue is 1.5 billion rubles, billion of which Sinara will receive from the federal budget. And this is not all - the portfolio of Sverdlovsk state orders of Pumpyansky's company in 2021 amounted to 34 billion rubles.

"Sinara" loves and knows how to master government contracts, but there are questions about the timing and quality. For example, PJSC Zvezda, which is under the control of Sinara and supplies diesel engines for the Navy, missed the deadline in the case of Project 22350 frigates.

Oleg Tony. Photo: https://vgudok.com/kolonka-patriota/olegu-toni-dostavlyayut-nepriyatnosti-nedobrozhelateli-razduvayut-skandal-vokrug

Similar difficulties arose at other enterprises of the billionaire. Sinara can get a contract for trains for the HSR and use this money, but it is far from the fact that everything will be done efficiently and on time. At the very least, a full-scale launch of the HSR between the two capitals by 2030 is a difficult idea to implement.

Do the structures of Russian Railways understand this? Yes, for sure, only there everyone cannot wait for the start of work on the high-speed rail, for this VSM Two Capitals LLC has already been created, headed by the hero of materials about investing in Western assets Oleg Tony. There is great reason to believe that such aksakals as Tony and Pumpyansky will definitely find a point for mutually beneficial cooperation.