Cyprus Bets On Washington After Decades Of Russian Alignment, With Arms Deals And Base Upgrades Reshaping Its Defense Posture

In January 2025, President Joe Biden authorized Cyprus to join US defense procurement programs, including Foreign Military Sales and Excess Defense Articles, cementing a security partnership that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

The authorization gave Nicosia direct access to American military hardware channels, arriving just months after US Ambassador John Breslow told the Cyprus News Agency that Washington intended to upgrade the Andreas Papandreou Air Base in Paphos to handle large military transport aircraft.

Breslow also outlined plans for more frequent US warship visits to Cypriot ports and a broader expansion of joint military activities, capping his remarks with an assurance that carries obvious political weight.

“The United States will protect Cyprus in the future,” he said, a statement that stops short of a formal security guarantee but signals how dramatically the bilateral relationship has evolved.

The depth of that evolution becomes clear only when set against the country’s long history of suspicion toward Washington and its decades of close alignment with Moscow.

Cyprus, which gained independence from Britain in 1960 and became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 under President Archbishop Makarios III, spent much of the Cold War era cultivating ties with the Soviet Union while keeping the United States at arm’s length.

Anti-American sentiment hardened after 1974, when Turkey invaded the island and Washington declined to take decisive action against Ankara, prioritizing its NATO relationship with Turkey above Nicosia’s security concerns.

The hostility reached a violent peak on August 19, 1974, when US Ambassador Roger Davies was shot and killed during a demonstration outside the American embassy in Nicosia.

A US arms embargo imposed in 1987 further strained relations and had an unintended consequence: it pushed the Cypriot National Guard toward Russian suppliers, deepening military dependence on Moscow through systems including T-80 tanks, Tor-M1 missiles and Buk air defense batteries.

Even as late as October 2021, then-Foreign Minister Nikos Christodoulides traveled to Moscow and signed a Strategic Cooperation Framework for 2022 to 2024 alongside Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four months later broke that trajectory entirely, forcing Nicosia into choices it had long avoided.

Konstantinos Adamides, an associate professor of international relations at the University of Nicosia, described the moment as a watershed, telling DW that “for the first time, the Republic of Cyprus openly and unequivocally chose to side with the West, despite the economic and political costs of breaking with Moscow.”

Cyprus aligned with EU sanctions on Russia, accepting significant economic pain given its historically strong links to Moscow in services, investment and tourism.

That political commitment, Adamides argued, convinced Washington that Cyprus could serve as a credible partner in the Eastern Mediterranean, opening the door to the security relationship now taking shape.

The institutional groundwork had in fact begun earlier, with a bilateral security cooperation agreement signed in 2018, followed by the April 2022 inauguration of CYCLOPS, a US-funded training center in Larnaca focused on port security, counterterrorism and hazardous materials interdiction.

Washington’s full suspension of the 1987 arms embargo in September 2022, which has since been renewed through September 30, 2027, removed the final structural barrier to Cyprus acquiring American lethal military equipment.

Sanctions on Russia have also accelerated the practical shift, making spare parts and ammunition for Russian-made systems increasingly difficult to obtain and pushing Cyprus to actively diversify its military inventory.

The question of NATO membership hangs over all of this, reignited when an Iranian drone made a crash landing on the British base at Akrotiri earlier this year.

Christodoulides said Cyprus was preparing for membership at the military, operational and administrative levels, but acknowledged it could not apply because “the political conditions are not there, taking into account the well-known position of Turkey.”

For a small island state that spent decades threading a careful path between superpowers, the scale of the pivot now underway represents a fundamental redefinition of where Cyprus places its security bets.