Regular foreign shipping to border zone fjord

The ship “Svartfoss” is owned by the shipping company Eimskip CTG and operates within the frames of the Northern Maritime Corridor (NMC) project, an EU-supported initiative on the facilitation of shipping between Europe and ports in Northwest Russia.

This is the third time Eimskip CTG calls up the Pechenga Bay, which is part of the militarized Russian border zone on the Kola Peninsula, some few kilometers from the border to Norway.

Despite harsh weather conditions in this area and military border restrictions, Eimskip CTG continue their shipping operations, as a natural part of their weekly call on Murmansk. The main customer in the Pechenga Bay is Russian Salmon, a company which produces salmon for the domestic Russian market, estimated to 20 000 ton annual.

Representative of Eimskip, Trond Lorentzen, says to BarentsObserver that the northern regions and specially Northwest Russia is the most exiting area present time.

“Northwest Russia’s economic development and the increase of the spending powers, attracts more and more consumer goods to this area, which is good for our export industry,” says Lorentzen.

“Our ambition two years ago was to call up Murmansk every third week. Now we have ship arrivals weekly and we are so far the only western company, which run this service on regular basis”, he says.

Project leader in the Stratmos project Northern Maritime Corridor, Harald Sørensen from the Norwegian Barents Secretariat, praises Eimskip CTG for still manage to get regular ship calls in Northwest Russia.

“I’m surprised that no other companies see the opportunity to get into the Russian marked via Murmansk. Eimskip has got good cross-border competence in the Russian High North, and now it seems that they also will sail regular to Pechenga. I hope also other companies will follow,” Harald Sørensen says.