Cyprus, a European Union (EU) member with traditional business ties to Russia, has seen a sizeable number of vessels leave its flag since the onset of EU sanctions against Moscow over the Ukraine war.
Cyprus has backed all EU sanctions meant to punish Russia for the invasion and to discourage it from pursuing it further. Alongside other European shipping nations, however, the government in Nicosia also pushed to soften sanctions proposals it feared would harm EU flags.
Figures provided to TradeWinds by the Cyprus government provide evidence that a certain amount of de-flagging has indeed taken place.
In the months following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, 70 vessels with a capacity of around 2.5 million gt were deleted from the Cyprus Registry due to EU sanctions, according to Vassilios Demetriades, the country’s deputy minister in charge of shipping.
That figure includes 20 tankers with a total capacity of 900,000 gt deleted since 6 October, when the EU announced its intention to sharpen sanctions by imposing a price cap on the seaborne Russian oil that European entities can insure and transport.
The de-flagging is in line with parallel moves in the sale-and-purchase market that saw dozens, if not hundreds, of tankers sold by Western owners to entities based in jurisdictions that impose no sanctions on Russia, such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, India and China.
“We can not state whether there will be more losses in the future. We will have to wait and see,” Demetriades said in a statement.
Cyprus hasn’t provided a more specific breakdown of the ships that left its registry.
A mixed picture
The small island republic is Europe’s biggest ship management hub, partly thanks to Russians setting up shop there after the fall of Communism in the early 1990s.
Several Russian companies such as Sovcomflot moved their headquarters from the island this year.
Clarksons data, however, suggest that Cyprus has managed to offset part of the losses by drawing other ships into the registry.
According to the brokerage’s latest World Fleet Monitor, the Cyprus flag lost just a net 12 ships between 1 February and 1 November — with the number of registered ships dropping from 1,034 to 1,022.
This could be the result of wide-ranging efforts to improve the service of the flag, streamlining operations and offering incentives for good environmental performance.
Other EU flags have shown outflows as well, even though it’s not immediately possible to pinpoint the reasons why, and with the drop being in line with long-term trends ongoing before the war in Ukraine.
According to the Clarksons World Fleet Monitor, 1,997 ships were flying the Maltese flag as of 1 November, down from 2,047 on 1 February and 2,131 at the end of 2020.
Between 1 February and 1 November, the number of ships flying the flag of an EU member state dropped to 11,920 ships from 11,994 vessels, continuing their decline from 12,029 vessels at the end of 2020.
The only EU flag showing noteworthy increases lately has been that of Portugal’s international ship registry of Madeira, which rose to 715 ships from 668 since the start of 2022.
((This article was amended since original publication to change the number of vessels deleted from the Cyprus registry, after Cypriot authorities corrected the figures initially provided))
