A European cargo ship was ready to set sail for Italy from the Ukrainian port of Mariupol with its load of 15,000 tons of steel slabs in late February. Then Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine. Three months later, there are signs that the ship may be seized by separatists allied with Russia.
On Tuesday, a self-declared representative of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the pro-Russian separatists in the area, told the crew members of the cargo ship that the local authorities were preparing to take possession of it, the ship’s owners said. That would effectively give Moscow control of the ship.
Officials with the Donetsk People’s Republic did not respond to a request for comment.
The ship, the Tzarevna, is owned by the Fratelli Cosulich Group, an Italian shipping company based in Genoa. Augusto Cosulich, the company’s chief executive officer, said in an interview that the threat to seize the ship “worries us.”
“It is a clear abuse of power in wartime,” he said.
He added that a representative for the separatists had offered the ship’s crew $1 million to buy the cargo ship. The Tzarevna, built in 2004 and currently sailing under the flag of Malta, is worth far more, he said, about $9 million. And its load of steel slabs, produced by the Azovstal steel plant, a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion, has a value of $12 million.
“There is no way we are accepting this extortion,” he said.
The ship is in good condition and has even temporarily sheltered crew members from other cargo vessels that were bombarded during the long battle for the eastern Ukrainian port of Mariupol. It currently has five Bulgarian crew members on board.
It was not immediately clear what the Russians would do with the cargo ship. Mr. Cosulich warned that his company would sue any entity that took possession of the vessel and docked in an international port. He added that Italian and Maltese authorities had been informed of the issue.
Giovanni Toti, president of the Liguria region in Italy, where the Fratelli Cosulich Group is based, said that Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, had assured him that he was committed to stopping the nationalization of the ship. Ministry officials confirmed they were working on the issue.
On the eve of the war, the Tzarevna had been scheduled to carry its load of steel to the industrial port of Monfalcone in northeastern Italy, near the hub of Italy’s steel industry, where rolling mills reduce the thickness of the slabs to make large sheets like those used to build ships’ hulls.
“This cargo was supposed to sail on the traditional route that steel slabs make from Ukraine and Russia to Italy,” said Gianclaudio Torlizzi, a commodity analyst and founder of the Italian consultancy firm T-Commodity.
Before the war, Italy imported a third of its steel slabs, cast iron and scrap from Ukraine and Russia, roughly 30.2 million tons of steel.