A Chinese cargo ship entered occupied Sevastopol, marking an unprecedented case of a foreign ship entering a Ukrainian port occupied by Russia. The Ukrainian Embassy in China has already raised the issue with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
This is reported by the Financial Times, citing comments from the Office of the President of Ukraine.
The Panamanian-flagged Heng Yang 9, owned and operated by Guangxi Changhai Shipping Company from Guangxi Province, has docked in Crimea at least three times in the past few months, according to Ukrainian officials.
The Financial Times was able to confirm the last of these visits in September using optical satellite imagery, radar data, transponder signals and conventional photographs.
The 140-meter Chinese container ship has been calling at Sevastopol since the opening of a new railway to Crimea in April. According to the Presidentʼs Office of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Heng Yang 9 has visited Sevastopol at least twice this summer.
Ukrainian officials believe that Russia is using this railway to transport goods from the occupied parts of Donetsk and Kherson regions, where heavy industry and agriculture are developed, to captured ports for further export.
The president’s office told the FT that the Heng Yang 9 was in port from June 19 to 22, its first visit to Sevastopol. After the visits to the Crimean port, the ship called at Turkish ports before heading to Alexandria in Egypt.
“Ukraine has made it clear that such actions are unacceptable and expects all international partners and companies to strictly avoid contact with the occupied territories,” the commissioner for sanctions policy Vladyslav Vlasyuk told the FT.
According to him, vessels entering occupied ports “risk being added to sanctions lists”. Ukraine is dissatisfied with this incident and will continue to monitor similar cases.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry responded by advising its citizens and companies to avoid contact with the occupied territories of Ukraine. Beijing assured that it would consider each case individually and take “appropriate measures”.
What evidence did the FT find?
An aerial photo of the vessel taken in Sevastopol on September 14 matches an image of the Heng Yang 9 taken three days later as the container ship passed through Istanbul. The containers on board the vessel are arranged in the same order as when passing through the Bosphorus.
A ship photographed in the harbor of Sevastopol on September 14.
Yörük Işık/ Airbus
Heng Yang 9 crosses the Bosphorus on September 17 with the same arrangement of containers on deck.
During a two-week voyage across the Black Sea in September, the ship appears to have falsified its routes, using a transponder to transmit false positions and conceal its movements.
The vessel is believed to have headed to Novorossiysk, a Russian port on the eastern Black Sea coast, where it was captured on satellite imagery on September 6. According to transponder transmissions, the vessel then headed to Port Kavkaz, a Russian port in the Kerch Strait between Russia and Crimea.
However, the European Space Agencyʼs “Sentinel-1” satellite took radar images of the port on September 9, just 10 minutes after the ship reported its presence in the harbor. No ship was at the indicated position.
On September 9, the Sentinel-1 radar satellite flew past the port of Kavkaz. There were no ships at or near the reported location of the vessel.
And on September 11 and 15, less than an hour after the ship reported its location, two Sentinel-2 satellites, which take optical images, flew over the area. On both occasions, no ship was at the indicated location.
Lloydʼs List analysis confirmed Ukrainian claims about previous voyages and indicated that the ship had been falsifying its routes during those voyages.
Crimean activists posted a photo that, according to them, shows a simpler attempt to hide the ship: its name on the stern was covered with white cloth.
- The use of Sevastopol has been banned by Western sanctions since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Although China has not joined the Western sanctions regime against Russia, its commercial ships have previously avoided Russian-controlled ports.
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