Cyprus: Russia’s outpost in the Mediterranean

last updated 8 January 2015

Luke Harding

The Guardian (U.K.)

Cyprus is becoming a Russian satellite state, said Luke Harding. Its president, Demetris Christofias, is a communist who was educated in Soviet Moscow and speaks fluent Russian. He and other officials in the EU country—the mostly Greek half of the divided island—exhibit an “embarrassing subservience” to Moscow. In 2010, for example, a Cypriot court released on bail a man accused of running a Russian spy ring in the U.S., resulting in his escape to Russia. And just last month, when Cypriot authorities found an illegal arms shipment to Syria on a Russian ship that had diverted to Cyprus because of a storm, they failed to confiscate the cargo, as required under the EU embargo on Syria. Of course, the “reluctance to offend Vladimir Putin is understandable.” Russia has guaranteed loans to prop up the Cypriot economy, and tens of thousands of Russian expats make Cyprus their home. Some are gangsters taking advantage of the island’s lax banking laws to launder money. Others are spies using the island as a base for Middle East operations. Does the EU realize that one of its members is, in effect, “an offshore colony of Russia”?