Anaklia is dredging now, and the operating date is 2029

The ministry's account is specific enough to check: two dredging vessels have entered the marine basin to deepen the harbour floor, the first of them the Tristao Da Cunha and the second a trailing suction hopper dredger named Al-Idrisi, and work on the main breakwater has begun. Those are the two jobs that have to be finished before anything else about a port is real. A breakwater and a dredged basin are what let ships of a size Georgia cannot currently take come alongside at all.

2029 is far enough out that nobody buying land near Anaklia today is buying a port; they are buying three years of heavy construction traffic followed by whatever the port turns out to be. That distinction matters for how the purchase is financed. Rental demand during a build phase comes from contractors and crews rather than from trade, it arrives sooner than the port does, and it leaves when the works finish. Those are two different markets and they do not hand over neatly from one to the other.

The ministry frames the port as strengthening Georgia's position on the Middle Corridor, the route that moves cargo between China and Europe across the Caspian and the Caucasus rather than through Russia. Georgia's existing ports handle that traffic now, within the limits of their depth. The case for Anaklia is that corridor volumes are expected to need capacity those ports do not have. Whether the volumes arrive is a question about other countries' railways and ferries as much as about Georgian concrete.

Anaklia has a long history of announced starts, so a ministry saying the works are on schedule is worth treating as a progress report rather than a guarantee. The checkable parts are the ones to follow: whether the breakwater keeps extending, whether the dredgers stay in the basin, whether the rail and road links to the site get funded on their own timetables. Those are visible from outside. A completion year, repeated, is not evidence by itself.