Another tanker carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Russia’s sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project docked in a Chinese port in September 2025, ship-tracking data showed, days after Russian President Vladimir Putin met Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General-Secretary Xi Jinping in Beijing. The LSEG tracking data indicated the Russian Voskhod LNG tanker was anchored at an LNG terminal in the port of Tieshan in China’s southwestern province of Guangxi.
The Russian-flagged tanker, with a cargo of 150,000 cubic meters of LNG, was loaded at the Arctic LNG 2 facility in Gydan in northern Siberia on July 19. The cargo is the second from the sanctioned project to dock in China after sanctioned tanker Arctic Mulan arrived at the Beihai LNG terminal in late August. Arctic Mulan’s cargo was the first from Arctic LNG to reach an end-user since it started up last year.
Reuters was not immediately able to ascertain if the LNG was discharged at Tieshan port, and telephone calls to the port went unanswered. The Arctic project began production in December 2023 but is behind schedule in supplying cargoes of the gas because of shortages of ice-class gas carriers and Western sanctions over Russia’s conflict with Ukraine. The cargo arrived days after Putin’s high-profile trip to China for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit and a military parade to celebrate the end of World War II.
Arctic LNG 2, which is 60% owned by Russia’s Novatek, was set to become one of the country’s largest LNG plants, with target output of 19.8 million metric tons per year, but sanctions have clouded its prospects. Last year, eight cargoes were loaded from Arctic LNG 2 onto several sanctioned LNG vessels, data shows. This year, six known cargoes have been loaded from the project, with some sanctioned tankers traveling east along the Northern Sea Route. Two tankers are berthed on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian far east, with a third in the South China Sea between Taiwan and Hainan Island, according to LSEG data.