Chinese Cargo Ship Arrives In Sevastopol For First Time Since 2014

The Chinese cargo ship Heng Yang 9 – which is registered in Panama – has visited Sevastopol in Crimea, marking the first major foreign vessel to use one of the Crimean ports since 2014, when hostilities with Ukraine first broke out and sanctions were imposed on the territory.

While China has not adopted the western sanctions regime against Russia, its commercial ships have previously avoided Crimean ports. The Heng Yang 9, which is owned and operated by the Changhai Shipping Company, based in Guangxi on China’s southwest coast has been seen docking at Sevastopol several times. It has been visiting Istanbul, Novorossiysk in Krasnodar, Crimea before returning to Istanbul and sailing onwards to Alexandria in Egypt.

The visits by the Heng Yang 9 coincide with the recent opening of a new railway into Crimea that allows containers to be delivered from Russia onto container ships. Russia opened two other ports in the new Russian regions, Berdyansk, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and Mariupol in the Donetsk People’s Republic, as open to foreign visitors last month. Russia exporters are probably transporting goods via rail from Berdyansk, Mariupol and Crimea to markets in Turkiye, Egypt and beyond.

While Berdyansk and Mariupol are more industrial centres, Crimea is an agricultural play, with a strong aptitude for wine-making. It also has light industrial production and a buoyant Russian tourism sector. Since reverting to Russia, spending on infrastructure development, the instigation of a Free Trade Zone and Russia’s own standing within trade blocs such as the EAEU and CIS have provided Crimea with a resumption of trade with its traditional partners. As a result, since 2014, Crimea has risen from 62nd to 48th place as concerns GDP size in Russian oblasts and republics. Crimea today has a GDP of about US$12 billion, rising from US$4.3 billion in 2013, meaning it has nearly tripled in economic size over the past decade with an average annual GDP growth rate of about 10%.

Sevastopol Port began from the last, 85^th position in Russia in 2014, and has subsequently risen to 76th place. The move indicates that some sense of normality is returning to the Crimean region, as well as to the new parts of Russia to the north, as Chinese shipping companies and Chinese businesses in general are risk adverse and will not take chances in conflict areas. There is also the matter of insurance costs. These recent developments suggest that the Crimean security situation has improved. That is good news for Crimean exporters as well as exporters in Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk. Like Crimea, these latter two regions declared independence from Ukraine in 2014 and became part of the Russian Federation in 2022.