Cyprus is upgrading its two principal military installations with American financial backing, in the clearest signal yet that the island's pivot toward the West has translated from diplomatic positioning into concrete infrastructure. The Associated Press was granted rare exclusive access to both facilities earlier this month, with National Guard spokesman Lt Col Paris Samoutis providing details of projects that are set to significantly expand Cyprus' capacity to support large-scale evacuations and humanitarian operations in the Eastern Mediterranean.
According to AP, at the Evangelos Florakis naval base in Mari, 229 kilometres from Lebanon's coast, a new heliport funded by US European Command will be built to accommodate large Chinook-type transport helicopters capable of airlifting evacuees directly out of conflict zones. The base will also receive revamped port facilities able to host frigates and other warships larger than the current Cypriot fleet, whose radar and missile systems would provide aerial protection for departing and arriving transport aircraft, reports AP. In the island's southwest, the Andreas Papandreou air base in Paphos will be expanded with a new aircraft apron capable of handling dozens of heavy-lift military transport planes, allowing faster refuelling and maintenance turnaround for aircraft supporting regional humanitarian missions. A newly formed regional firefighting coordination centre, planned to assist neighbouring Middle Eastern countries in tackling major wildfires, is also set to be inaugurated at the air base next month.
Work on both projects is expected to begin in 2027, according to Defence Minister Vasilis Palmas. The US has so far committed €500,000 for a development plan to determine the full cost of the air base expansion, with preliminary estimates putting that project at around €14 million, AP reports. The naval base upgrade is expected to exceed €200 million, with Cyprus actively seeking additional EU funding for that component. "Cyprus remains part of the solution, not the problem," Samoutis told AP, echoing a phrase that has become something of a guiding principle for the Christodoulides presidency.
A decade of strategic repositioning
The scale of US involvement in Cyprus's military infrastructure would have been difficult to imagine a decade ago. For much of its post-independence history, Cyprus maintained a studied non-alignment, and the US military relied almost entirely on the two British Sovereign Base Areas, RAF Akrotiri and Dhekelia, when it needed a foothold in the Eastern Mediterranean. That changed as Cyprus began a deliberate turn westward, a shift that accelerated sharply under President Nikos Christodoulides since his election in 2023. His administration ended a decades-long US arms embargo on Cyprus and opened new avenues for defence and economic cooperation, with Christodoulides leveraging the island's geography to make the case to both Washington and Brussels that Cyprus is the natural bridge between Europe and a turbulent Middle East.
That argument has been tested and validated by events. In April 2023, Cyprus became a transit point for evacuating third-country nationals from crisis-hit Sudan. In June 2025, when the US and Israel struck Iran's nuclear facilities, the island again served as a way station for people leaving Israel and for Israelis stranded abroad seeking to return home. In 2024, the island activated the Amalthea maritime corridor, shipping thousands of tonnes of humanitarian aid to Gaza, initially directly and later through the Israeli port of Ashdod. Numerous EU partners and other countries have deployed civilian staff, troops, helicopters and aircraft in Cyprus to assist in potential citizen evacuations from Lebanon. The US itself deployed a Marine contingent at Paphos air base in 2024, with V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, for exactly that purpose.
The RAF Akrotiri base, meanwhile, was struck by a Shahed drone on 2 March, launched from Lebanon according to Cypriot officials, underscoring the strategic vulnerability of existing infrastructure and the value of redundancy in the region.
The risks alongside the gains
The upgrade of Cyprus's own installations offers Washington and EU partners such as France options beyond the British bases, and Christodoulides has been explicit that their use will be restricted to humanitarian operations and will not extend to offensive military action. But as Politis reported in September 2025, analysts have cautioned that the line between humanitarian and military infrastructure is not always as clear as governments present it, and that the investment carries geopolitical risks alongside its benefits.
Speaking at the time, James Ker-Lindsay, a long-standing analyst on international affairs, welcomed Cyprus's westward shift while noting that agreements with Washington should be treated with a degree of caution. Former Turkish Cypriot negotiator and international relations scholar Kudret Özersay had warned that Ankara does not read the base upgrades as purely humanitarian in character: "Under the current circumstances in world politics, Turkey is not naïve on these matters. Perception on the Turkish Cypriot and Turkish side is that this is something definitely connected to security and military, not something limited to humanitarian purposes." He argued that military investments made today for humanitarian purposes could, depending on circumstances, quickly take on a different character, and that the Cypriot government was unlikely to convince Turkey otherwise.
The government has consistently maintained that both bases remain under full Cypriot sovereignty and control, and that no agreement involves ceding authority to foreign partners. That commitment will be tested as the projects move from planning to construction, and as the conflict dynamics that have made Cyprus indispensable to its allies continue to evolve.
Sources: Associated Press, Euronews