The vessel was the first to bring goods from the former Russian bloc into Canada’s northern Manitoba via the ‘Arctic bridge’, a sea passage likely to be available between the countries for much longer as global warming melts the sea ice that closed Churchill for all but four months of the year.

Research fellow Michael Berk of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs is reported as saying Churchill could become one end of an important trade route linking Russia and North America.

“As ice continues to melt, this is potentially the shortest route connecting North America to Eurasia,” he said. “If we expand and connect Churchill with Murmansk, we’re talking about creating a bridge linking North American markets with increasingly important Eurasian markets. It’s also the closest route for transporting goods from Asia to the Midwestern United States directly, bypassing the bottlenecks of congested ports in the Pacific. When one starts to think about these issues combined, the opportunity is tremendous,” he said.

All that must be music to the ears of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s trade with other countries is warming in a similar global fashion. He is leading a huge push for modernisation of the country’s port facilities and shipping fleet under his Marine Doctrine, a plan for development that’s due to stay in force for a dozen years. Within that he seeks to woo foreign investors and companies, and has called for the establishment of free economic zones with preferential tax regimes, and urged changes in Russia law to make them possible.

First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov puts it more bluntly: “We want to increase the volume of supplies passing through our ports and create an attractive environment for investors, so that all transportation companies, Russian and foreign, will find it advantageous to use our ports for shipping their goods.”

About 60% of Russia’s foreign trade freight turnover travels by sea through any one of 62 port enterprises, and President Putin wants to see improvements in every aspect of their operation. He says: “Russia’s effective integration into the global transport system – and its overall economic development – depends on having a competitive sea transport system.”

His first priority is to develop its ports, which he acknowledges lag behind modern standards, and don’t meet the demands of the 21^st-century Russian economy. “We need to build new facilities and modernise existing port facilities,” he says. This will clearly increase transit capacity, so President Putin further aspires to develop the road and rail infrastructure to support his enhanced ports. “We need to create the conditions for ensuring that all cargo is delivered on time and without loss of quality,” he says.

On the ground, that means major port development projects. The scale of this work is illustrated by Konecranes contracts, agreed in the autumn, to supply 27 cranes with a variety of specifications to four ports. Nineteen are for container terminals operated by the National Container Company – at St Petersburg, Ust-Luga and Shusary – in a deal worth more than €40m ($58.9m) and due for delivery this year and next. Separate contracts cover a further eight container-handling cranes for the OJSC Petrolesport terminal in St Petersburg, all due for delivery in the middle of this year. Konecrane’s director, Ports Jarmo Juntunen says: “The orders confirm our strong position as key crane supplier in ports in the Baltic Sea area.”

Energy from the Arctic’s western region is another key area on which Russia has a firm focus, expecting it to yield as much as 40m tonnes of oil and gas by 2015. Says President Putin: “This means we not only need to actively develop the Arctic transport system, but also take environmental protection measures – we all know how fragile the ecosystem is in this region – and work overall to ensure Russian economic, scientific and defence interests in the Arctic.”

Underwriting this need is the creation of a ‘superfleet’ of energy tankers, substantially achieved through the consolidation of Sovcomflot and Novoship by transfer of the government’s controlling shareholding in the latter to the former. Already the fleet is 124 vessels strong, and there are a further 31 new ones on order. When delivered, they’ll take its dwt total to 11.5m tonnes. Igor Shuvalov, chairman of the board of both Sovcomflot and Novoship, says: “The consolidation of the two state-controlled shipping assets strengthens Russia’s role as a leading supplier of energy to the world market by providing efficient, safe and reliable seaborne energy logistics.”

Sovcomflot’s president and chief executive Sergey Frank adds: “Sovcomflot will act as a catalyst for the development of Russian maritime clusters in Saint Petersburg, Novorossiysk, Murmansk, and the Russian Far East.”

Russian development has obvious implications for the Baltic states. Companies are changing their routes to take account of customer demand for regular links. One example is Samskip, which recently altered its ScanBalt service to include regular services to Klaipeda in Lithuania and Ventspils in Latvia. The company’s Mulitmodal Container Logistics cheif executive Jens Holger Nielsen says: “There is a real demand for this service; demand for better multimodal solutions is booming.” The service now sails from Zeebrugge weekly on Fridays with a Monday morning arrival in Helsingborg, and that means goods can be in Ventspils in five days and Moscow in 10 or 12.

Such speed, and the willpower that makes it possible, indicate that the Russian bear is emphatically out of hibernation, and that its eager consumers are on everyone’s doorstep.