Remember how, in 2015, the head of Russian Railways proposed building a super-highway from London to New York across the whole of Eurasia and North America, to include a railway, a motorway and oil pipelines?

The project was called the Trans-Eurasian Belt Development, but the prospect of its ever being realised was greeted with scepticism in expert circles: since the cost of the project was estimated at several trillion dollars, its implementation by anybody's efforts whatsoever was considered doubtful.

Now, ten years on, everyone of course understands that it was not such a large figure after all, a mere few trillion