Close to 100 large merchant ships have moved to the Russian flag since June, Deputy PM Nikitin says, PRIME reports

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Nikitin has said that several dozen large merchant vessels, approaching a hundred, have switched to the Russian flag, the Russian news agency PRIME reports. In an interview with the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, Nikitin linked the shift to President Vladimir Putin's call at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in June for ships to register in Russia, and said the process was continuing. According to PRIME, he said the government had already taken several steps to encourage reflagging, with further work still to be done. The agency did not name the vessels, their owners or the flags they had left.

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