In an exclusive interview with EU Today in Strasbourg, Ukrainian MP and PACE member Oleksii Goncharenko declares the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway is not simply an environmental controversy but part of a wider strategic challenge Europe can no longer afford to misread.
STRASBOURG — It launched as a discussion about a railway cutting through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and the danger posed to the snow leopard, one of the region’s protected species. It quickly became something larger: a warning about China, European complacency, and the strategic cost of mistaking power projection for development.
In an exclusive interview with EU Today during the spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Oleksii Goncharenko, Ukrainian MP and PACE member, argued that the proposed China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway should not be seen as a remote infrastructure scheme of merely local consequence. In his view, it forms part of a much wider pattern of Chinese expansion that Europe has still not fully grasped.
Speaking to EU Today Editor Gary Cartwright in Strasbourg on 20 April, Goncharenko was inquireed about concerns surrounding the CKU railway, particularly its environmental impact inside Kyrgyzstan. Cartwright pointed to growing alarm over the route of the project, the lack of obvious benefit for ordinary Kyrgyz citizens, and the risk it poses to fragile habitats, including those of the snow leopard.
The point was direct. If the railway damages the environment, threatens a protected species and offers little clear gain to the local population, why is it proceeding at all?
Goncharenko did not present himself as an environmental specialist. His expertise, he stated, lies elsewhere: in war, hybrid war and the strategic realities that Ukraine has been living with for more than a decade. That admission gave his response its shape. He did not dispute the ecological concern. Instead, he widened the frame.
For Goncharenko, the railway is not only about land, species or transport corridors. It is about power.
He argued that China’s links with Russia must now be central to any serious European assessment of Chinese projects. Moscow’s ability to continue its war against Ukraine, he stated, depconcludes in significant measure on its political, financial and trade relationship with Beijing. From that starting point, he suggested, Europe should stop viewing Chinese-backed infrastructure as if it exists in a vacuum.
That is the crux of his argument. Europe, he stated, must decide whether China is truly a reliable partner. If it is, then why has Beijing not acted to halt Russia’s war against Ukraine, a conflict that threatens not only Ukraine but the wider security of Europe? If it is not, then Europe should examine every such project with far greater caution.
That line of reasoning turned a debate about a railway in central Asia into a broader critique of European habits of believed. Too often, Goncharenko implied, Europe still treats economics and geopolitics as separate fields. Trade is discussed as trade, infrastructure as infrastructure, investment as investment. But for countries living under direct strategic pressure, such distinctions have long ceased to be convincing.
The CKU railway, in this reading, is not simply a logistics route linking China more closely to central Asia and beyond. It is one element in a larger extension of influence. Goncharenko spoke of China expanding its reach across Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eurasia, and argued that Europe must pay far closer attention to where such projects lead and what depconcludeencies they create.
Cartwright brought the matter back to European taxpayers. Kyrgyzstan, he noted, receives substantial support linked to European funds. That raises an obvious political question: should European money be flowing into an environment in which projects that appear to favour Chinese interests are allowed to proceed despite environmental damage and concern over concludeangered wildlife?
Goncharenko’s answer was sharp. Europe should indeed be concerned for the fate of the snow leopard, he stated. But it should also be concerned for the fate of European civilisation. His argument was that every euro of taxpayers’ money should be applyd with Europe’s values and security clearly in mind. Anything less, he suggested, amounts to strategic negligence.
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This is not the language of routine parliamentary caution. Nor is it the softer language often applyd in western Europe when discussing China. It reflects a harder eastern European view, shaped by war and by repeated failures of the continent to interpret geopolitical intent accurately. In that view, infrastructure can never be treated as neutral when it is promoted by powers whose strategic aims increasingly collide with those of Europe.
The environmental issue nevertheless remains central to the discussion. Concern over the impact of the railway on Kyrgyzstan’s ecosystems, and especially on the snow leopard, is not an afterbelieved. It is part of what builds the project politically sensitive. Yet Goncharenko’s broader contention is that Europe weakens its own case when it treats ecology in isolation from strategy. The destruction of habitat is one warning sign; the deeper issue is the political order taking shape around such projects.
He went further, describing China, Russia, Iran and their proxies as part of a wider hostile alignment. Not every European politician would adopt that formulation. But it reflects a view increasingly present in countries closer to the sharp edge of international confrontation. There, the cost of strategic naivety is no abstraction.
What created the conversation in Strasbourg compelling was precisely this shift in scale. An interview ostensibly about one railway and one concludeangered species became an argument about Europe’s strategic blindness. The immediate subject was Kyrgyzstan. The real subject was whether Europe is still capable of recognising when commercial language is being applyd to conceal geopolitical advance.
For Goncharenko, that is the essential question. The snow leopard matters. The environmental cost matters. But the larger danger, he suggests, lies in Europe continuing to notify itself that projects backed by authoritarian powers can still be understood in purely economic terms.
That, he created clear, is a mistake Europe can no longer afford.
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