Customs Requirements and Regulations in the Ports of Ukraine.

Despite the fact, that we have repeatedly reported to our Principals and their Members on outrageous Customs’ “activities” in Nikolaev (Ukrainian: Mykolaiv) sea area (which includes three Seaports and 2 commercial terminals), i.e. their practice to impose huge fines on foreign-flagged ships for failure to declare the ship’s stores and any goods on board, we regret to say that the situation has not improved.

 

Therefore, we would wish to remind all the parties concerned that before entering at the ports of Ukraine almost everything on board shall be inserted in the Customs’ declaration: medicines (drugs), cash both that of the ship and the crew members’ personal savings, barrels/tins of paint or oil, as well as any other stores and various commodities on board, fuel and diesel oil in ship’s tanks also should be declared correctly according to latest calculations of Chief Engineer.

 

The Nikolaev Customs’ officers do the sounding of the ship’s bunker tanks, i.e. actually perform a bunker survey of fuel and diesel oil and if they found any discrepancy between their findings and figures declared by the Chief Engineer the fine is inevitable. The sum of the fine is rather huge - it is calculated as double cost of undeclared goods. Inaccurately declared bunker leads to particularly high fines.

 

Our statistics shows that every week on average one ship is getting fined by the Customs and we do urge the ships’ Masters to adhere closely to the ship’s agents’ recommendations/instructions and to declare almost everything on board the ships to comply with strict requirements of the Ukrainian Customs.   As a rule, ship’s agents provide Master/Owners with Customs’ requirements in their pre-arrival notices but we presume that in many cases Members do not take adequate care and attention to such notices. 

Updated 07.12.2020