A group of experts from the US are to visit Paphos’ Andreas Papandreou airbase to discuss planned upgrades to it, President Nikos Christodoulides said on Saturday.

Speaking at a European People’s Party event in Berlin, he said the US government had informed him that a visit would be made.

In the same speech, he said he had also spoken with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen about plans to upgrade the Mari naval base.

There is interest from the European Union. It is a naval base which will be utilised by the EU and the union’s member states,” he said.

Plans to upgrade both the Mari naval base and the Andreas Papandreou airbase were publicly announced by the government at the end of last year, with Defence Minister Vasilis Palmas saying the upgrades at Mari may cost in excess of €200 million.

He said the upgrades constitute a “large project which will be subsidised”, and both he and Christodoulides said efforts would be made to secure funding for it from the EU for this purpose.

“It will be a complete upgrade as provided for by international procedures and technical methods for implementing such projects,” he said, adding that the “pre-study” for Mari’s planned upgrades has now been completed, and that the government is now “at the study stage”.

“So, when the study is completed, and it will take time to compete, we will be able to speak more in detail about this matter, though that will of course be to the extent to which we are allowed to speak publicly,” he said.

He went on to say that upgrades to the airbase would only cost between €10m and €14m, “depending on the outcome of the recommendations and proposals which will be made”.

Christodoulides has suggested that the US may offer financial assistance to the Republic of Cyprus for the bases’ upgrades.

“We discussed it with the Americans, who are interested, and who utilised the Andreas Papandreou base for humanitarian purposes,” he said, while adding that members of both the US’ political parties visited the base in October.

The latest announcement regarding the bases’ upgrades comes after outgoing US President Joe Biden had issued a Presidential determination which incorporated the Republic of Cyprus into three programmes run by the US department of defence.

Those are the US defence security cooperation agency’s foreign military sales (FMS) programme, its excess defence articles (EDA) programme, and programmes to allocate resources under the US’ ‘Title 10’ security assistance provisions.