Britain has designated Russia’s largest shipbuilding corporation on the grounds that it supplied frigates and other warship classes deployed in Crimea, and the sanctions list now names 645 individual ships under the Russia regulations, according to the UK Sanctions List published by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
Public Joint Stock Company United Shipbuilding Corporation was designated on 24 February 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The statement of reasons sets out the naval case against it.
It reads: “Public Joint Stock Company (PJSC) United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC) is a Russian state-owned enterprise. USC is the largest shipbuilding corporation in Russia, uniting shipbuilding, repair and maintenance subsidiaries. This includes the supply of several frigates and other warship classes that have been deployed in Crimea since Russia illegally annexed the region in 2014, and have conducted drills in the Black Sea in 2021. Therefore USC has been involved in destabilising Ukraine or undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine. USC also operates in a sector of strategic significance, specifically, the Russian defence sector.”
USC carries an asset freeze, trust services sanctions and the director disqualification sanction imposed in April 2025. It is the holding company that owns most of Russia’s major yards, including Sevmash at Severodvinsk where the ballistic missile and cruise missile submarines are built, the Admiralty Shipyards and Severnaya Verf in St Petersburg, and Yantar at Kaliningrad.
Two individual yards carry designations of their own, the first of them JSC Zelenodolsk Shipyard in Tatarstan, designated on 15 March 2022, with the department recording that it “is a Russian shipbuilding enterprise that has constructed more than 1500 sea- and river-going ships and vessels” and that it therefore carries on business in sectors of strategic significance to the Russian government. The yard builds the Buyan-M class corvettes that have fired Kalibr cruise missiles into Ukraine, and the Gepard class frigates.
JSC Zaliv Shipyard at Kerch in occupied Crimea was designated earlier, on 31 December 2020, and for a different reason. The statement of reasons says it “actively participated in the construction of new railway approaches to the Kerch Bridge, connecting Russian to the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula. Therefore, it is supporting the consolidation of the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula into the Russian Federation.” The yard has since taken on the two Ivan Rogov class amphibious assault ships, the largest warships Russia has laid down in decades.
The list reaches down into the supply chain that serves those yards. Forss Technology Ltd of St Petersburg was designated on 4 May 2022 as a company “providing engineering services in shipbuilding, machine building, electrical technology, instruments manufacturing and high-tech products development”. Kranark LLC went the same day, on the grounds that it “has provided equipment for the construction of the Zvezda shipbuilding complex, a strategically important project for the Government of Russia”, the Far Eastern yard built to produce ice-class tankers and gas carriers for the Arctic routes.
On the commercial side, Sovcomflot, the Russian state shipping company, was designated on 18 May 2023. The 645 named vessels sit alongside it under shipping and transport sanctions, which bar a specified ship from entering a British port, allow it to be detained or given a movement direction, and permit its registration on the UK Ship Register to be terminated. Most of those listings carry the same wording, that the vessel “is involved in carrying oil or oil products that originated in Russia from Russia to a third country”.
Naval officers appear alongside the companies and the hulls, among them Rear Admiral Denis Berezovskiy, designated on 31 December 2020, who was appointed commander of the Ukrainian Navy on 1 March 2014 and swore an oath to the Crimean armed forces, breaking his oath to the Ukrainian Navy, before becoming Deputy Commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and later of the Pacific Fleet. Rear Admiral Valery Kulikov, a former Deputy Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, is listed as responsible for commanding forces that occupied Ukrainian sovereign territory.
