Each day, a caravan of trucks stretches for miles along a mountain highway in Georgia, near the border with Russia. Each day, the line seems to get longer.
The trucks wait for days with their cargo — car parts, industrial materials, chemicals, even the paper for tea bags — to cross the frontier on a journey that usually starts in Turkey and ends in Russian towns and cities where Western goods are in high demand.
The war in Ukraine abruptly cut many of Russia’s trade links to Europe, but the country’s economy quickly made adjustments, finding alternative routes for imports. Over the past 10 months, Georgia — a former Soviet republic of 3.6 million that fought its own painful war with Moscow in 2008 — has emerged as a convenient logistics conduit between Russia and the outside world.