Dubai Tower becomes first ship on a regular Arctic route between China and the UK

The container ship Dubai Tower left China’s Ningbo-Zhoushan port on 15 August and arrived in the United Kingdom a little over three weeks later, becoming the first vessel to operate in a regularly scheduled Northern Sea Route service.

It travelled along Russia’s Arctic shoreline, on a passage of about 5,600 kilometres between the Kara Strait and the Bering Strait.

A China-Europe voyage by this route takes about twenty days, around half the time of a journey through the Suez Canal. Sea Legend Shipping has pledged to run a regular seasonal service on the route.

Shipping companies are looking north as Russia’s war against Ukraine, the US-Israeli war on Iran and the standoff between the United States and China push shipping towards Arctic routes.

The Arctic shortcut comes with a particular set of gatekeepers. The Northern Sea Route Administration, an agency operating under the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom, grants navigation permits. Russia’s control of the route is based on Article 234 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Vessels on the passage travel with icebreakers drawn from a fleet of about forty-five ships, eight of them nuclear-powered.

Russia has spent years trying to turn this geography into cargo volume. A presidential order in 2018 required annual traffic on the route to reach 80 million tons by 2024.

The target remained distant. Just 37.9 million tons moved along the route in 2024, less than half the amount set out in the order. Cargo traffic then fell 2.3 percent to 37 million tons in 2025.

Transit activity nevertheless reached a record 103 Asia-to-Europe passages in 2025. Those voyages carried 3.2 million tons, accounting for less than 9 percent of all cargo on the route.

The physical barrier is also changing. In March 2025, Arctic sea ice covered its smallest area since record-keeping began forty-seven years earlier. At the end of summer 2025, sea ice cover was 28 percent below its 2005 level.

Dubai Tower’s journey puts a scheduled service on the route. The cargo figures show how limited the transit business remains within Russia’s Arctic shipping corridor.