Loading
Down an alleywayTRNCUNTRNCEUUN EUITYour browser does not support the element. off a busy street on the Turkish northern side of Cyprus’s divided capital, Nicosia, stands a scruffy building. A propped-open door reveals messy wiring sprouting from the wall. Two white paper signs tattily embossed with coats of arms are plastered on either side, one in Cyrillic script, the other in Turkish. This, unimpressively enough, is the Russian consulate.It is part of a new kind of Russian invasion. Accurate numbers are hard to come by, but Mete Hatay, a demographer in Nicosia, reckons a total of around 20,000 Russians and Ukrainians live in the divided island’s Turkish bit. Some of the Russians moved there from the Republic of Cyprus, the internationally recognised Greek-dominated southern chunk, after an array of sanctions was imposed on Russia following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Others have travelled from Russia itself via Istanbul. That has complicated matters on the island. Cyprus has been rent in twain since Turkey invaded the northernmost part in 1974. With a population of around 550,000, the self-styled Turkish Republic of North Cyprus () is isolated diplomatically and recognised only by Turkey. More than a million people live in the south, on the other side of a -run buffer zone known as the Green Line. Attempts to reunify the island along federal lines have repeatedly failed, most recently in 2017.Since his election in 2020, Ersin Tatar, the ’s president, has called for a two-state solution. He is dead against any sort of unification with the south, which is part of the . “The Turkish element will be very difficult to protect,” he says. “Our identity will be at risk.” Recent informal talks between the two sides brokered in New York by António Guterres, the secretary-general, were the first for several years. More are scheduled at the end of this month but hope of progress is faint.Rich Russians have flocked to Cyprus’s larger, internationally recognised Greek-dominated southern slice since the early 1990s, which became popular as an offshore tax haven. Limassol, its second-biggest city, was dubbed “Limassolgrad”. A now defunct “golden passport” scheme, whereby investors could pay €2.2m ($2.3m) to get a Cypriot passport, which grants citizenship, cemented ties between the two countries. The love-in was mutual. Cyprus was at one stage technically the biggest foreign investor in Russia.But the war in Ukraine has upset that cosy arrangement. As a country that has suffered an illegal invasion, Cyprus—and its banks—had no other choice but to comply with sanctions against Russia, says Theodoros Gotsis, deputy head of security policy at the foreign ministry in Nicosia. Russians in the Turkish north outnumber Ukrainians there, perhaps reflecting their status as international pariahs. Ksenia Mukhortova, president of a Ukrainian-Cypriot friendship society, says Ukrainians tend not to go to the north, as it is like going to Crimea, grabbed by Russia in 2014. “Both support the occupation of other people’s territories.” A former worker who has lived in Limassol for ten years, she finds friendship with Russians hard since the invasion of 2022. “They don’t want to talk about it,” she says. “Now is not a good time. We’re losing and we know it.” From afar, the Kremlin has stirred rancour between the two communities. Yet despite its loss of Russian tourists and business, the Cypriot economy has been lucky, says Fiona Mullen of Sapienta Economics, a Nicosia-based consultancy. “It has got a whole bunch of Lebanese and Israeli clients who want somewhere safe to do business,” she says. Since October 7th a stream of Israelis has arrived. And chaos in Lebanon has prompted another influx to the southern part of the island.Cyprus has long benefited from catastrophe at the eastern end of the Mediterranean as a haven for the rich to sit out conflict, says Hubert Faustmann of Nicosia University. But this time some Cypriot officials have been unnerved by predictions that another 10,000 Lebanese refugees could arrive at its shores. Can the luck of Cyprus last?
