#Russia's Shadow Tanker Fleet

[faultfalha]

China is in the process of building a "shadow fleet" of tanker ships. This fleet will be used to transport oil to Beijing, and to other parts of the world, in order to ensure that the Chinese government has a secure supply of oil, in the event of a global crisis. The construction of this shadowy fleet is taking place in complete secrecy. Not even the Chinese people know about it. The ships are being built in a hidden shipyard, on the coast of China. This fleet is a sign of China's growing power and influence in the world. It is clear that the Chinese government is preparing for the future, and is not afraid to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure its security.

[mariacallous]

On a chilly spring morning in March, British coast guards spotted something unusual around 100 kilometers off the Scottish shoreline: a dark stain, stretching 23 kilometers into the North Atlantic Ocean.

According to an internal analysis prepared by the coast guard’s satellite services and seen by POLITICO, the likely source of that stain was Innova, a tanker roughly the size of the Eiffel Tower that at the time was hauling 1 million barrels of sanctioned oil from Russia on its way to a refinery in India.

Yet the coast guard did little to investigate further, and the tanker — free from any repercussion — continues to trade oil today, helping fill the Kremlin’s war chest more than two years into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The Innova is just one of hundreds in the world’s so-called shadow fleet, a collection of often aging, poorly maintained ships sailing in defiance of Western sanctions — and spreading environmental harm without consequences. 

A joint investigation by POLITICO and the not-for-profit journalism group SourceMaterial found at least nine instances of covert shadow fleet vessels leaving spills in the world’s waters since 2021, using satellite images from the SkyTruth NGO paired with shipping data from market analysis firm Lloyd’s List and commodity platform Kpler.

Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard told POLITICO the ships posed a “significant danger” to the marine environment. “The incidents [here] illustrate this.”

It’s a problem that’s only grown worse following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With Moscow under Western sanctions, an increasing number of tankers are ferrying illicit goods — and potential environmental devastation — across the globe. Not only are these vessels creaky and largely unregulated, they’re often uninsured, meaning that in case of a leak, or more serious spill, a government would struggle to hold them accountable. 

POLITICO and SourceMaterial identified discharges everywhere from Thailand to Vietnam to Italy and Mexico, all linked to the shadow fleet. The tankers also passed through busy shipping corridors like the Red Sea and the Panama Canal, meaning any serious accident could rupture international trade routes. 

Experts believe it’s only a matter of time before one of these ships suffers a catastrophe with major environmental — and economic — devastation.

“The oil spills and risk of slicks are horrendous,” said Isaac Levi, Europe-Russia lead and a shadow fleet expert at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), a think tank. “Beyond the environmental damage, some of which will be irreversible, it’s a huge impact to coastal states that have to bear the cost of cleaning this up.”

In short: “It’s a ticking time bomb,” Levi said.

[sa7abnews]

Mideast oil powerhouse bans Russian 'shadow fleet' vessels that seek to undermine sanctions

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/16/mideast-oil-powerhouse-bans-russian-shadow-fleet-vessels-that-seek-to-undermine-sanctions/

Mideast oil powerhouse bans Russian 'shadow fleet' vessels that seek to undermine sanctions

The United Arab Emirates has pushed back on Russia’s efforts to circumvent Western sanctions through a “shadow fleet” by refusing entry to its port for any ship from the African country of Eswatini. “Using a ‘shadow fleet’ to smuggle oil while concealing its origin, in order to circumvent Western economic sanctions has been part of Putin’s playbook of sanction-proofing Russia’s economy,” Rebekah Koffler, a former DIA intelligence officer and author of “Putin’s Playbook,” told Fox News Digital. “Moscow anticipated U.S. sanctions prior to the invasion of Ukraine,” Koffler said. “So, Putin has been sanction-proofing the Russian economy with several measures since 2014, when the Russian forces took over Crimea.””The vessels comprising this dark fleet are typically aging, lack proper safety standards, lack insurance, hence they present a threat to maritime security as they can create a hazardous situation at any time,” she added. PUTIN SCRAMBLES AS UKRAINE ADVANCES TROOPS ALONG ‘DORMANT FRONT’ IN BORDER SECURITY OPERATIONA list of ships published by the UAE Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure names Eswatini as the latest country to which no services from any UAE ship agents or maritime company should be provided as they “are not complying with this circular to avoid legal accountability.” “…this Administration has decided to include the vessels registered under the flag state of Eswatini (Swaziland) to the existing list of restricted flag State vessels calling UAE waters and ports, unless they are classified by a member of IACS Class or by the Emirates Classification Society,” the notice read. The flags of Eswatini started showing up this year, with ship broker Clarkson Research Services Ltd. reporting zero ships in 2023 registered under the Eswatini flag even as 26 such ships now sail the seas. TRUMP-MUSK INTERVIEW: 5 BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS FROM THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION TO THE US BORDER CRISISEswatini is a landlocked country in Southern Africa and has increasingly worked with Russia to transport oil as part of dodging sanctions. Bloomberg tracked the ownership of 18 Eswatini-flagged ships in ship-tracking data, finding that 16 had “unclear” ownership, but that several tankers transported oil produced in Russia and Iran. The United States sanctioned three Eswatini ships for supporting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and later helping export grain from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine during the briefly brokered grain corridor, according to The Economist. A spokesman for the Eswatini ship registry told the outlet that the country delisted two of the ships for breaking the country’s administration guidelines of compliance, but one month later two of the ships continued to fly the Eswatini flag. The spokesman argued that once the country delists a ship, they stop following them, and any use of the flag is “illegal and invalid.” BIDEN ADMIN ANNOUNCES ANOTHER $125M IN MILITARY ASSISTANCE FOR UKRAINE AS FIGHTING INTENSIFIES ON RUSSIAN SOILThe Atlantic Council think tank in January published a report on the growing Russian “dark fleet,” estimating that 1,400 ships make up the fleet and operate in a “gray zone” that makes it hard for countries to punish. The great concern, as both Koffler and the Atlantic Council noted, focuses on the poor condition of these ships since they operate illegally and do not want to raise suspicion from officials. The think tank called such ships “aging and poorly maintained,” which has given rise to incidents that legitimate vessels end up having to pay for, since the shadow fleet lacks proper insurance.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPThat puts the burden on coastal nations, which are obligated under search-and-rescue convention to put in time and resources to help distressed illegal vessels without recourse. “The potential harm to coastal states is tangible, but since the aggression doesn’t involve military, it means it’s virtually impossible for a country to avenge harm caused to it by a shadow vessel, even if it can prove the ship is transporting Russian cargo,” Atlantic Council senior fellow Elisabeth Braw wrote. 

[cyberbenb]

How Russia finances greek business. Dedicated to the adherents of the “Shadow Fleet” sect

In May 2024, not “shadowy,” but completely transparent tankers belonging to Greek shipowners, a member of the EU and NATO, transported: - Russian crude oil from Russian ports in the Baltic Sea - 3.4 m Source : ukrainefrontlines.com/business/…

[head-post]

Russia has an unprecedented amount of money in its treasury

A new CREA analysis shows that Russia has entered 2024 with an unprecedented amount of money in state coffers, helped by a record $37 billion in crude oil sales to India last year, CNN reports.

In a new analysis, experts concluded that some of the crude oil was refined by India and then exported to the US in the form of petroleum products worth more than $1 billion.

According to an analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), exclusively provided to CNN, this stream of payments, which ultimately benefits Moscow, is because India has increased its purchases of Russian oil by more than 13 times its pre-war volumes. This is tantamount to New Delhi, a strategic partner of the US, replacing Western buyers with oil purchases reduced due to sanctions imposed over the conflict in Ukraine.

The sale of Russian oil to India is entirely legal and not subject to sanctions, but in examining the shipping route, experts have suggested that this huge volume of shipments may involve a so-called “shadow fleet” of tankers specifically created by Moscow to maximise the Kremlin’s profits.

Read more HERE

[panelki]

U.K. Lawmakers Warn Russia Skirting Oil Sanctions With 'Shadow' Tankers There is "growing evidence" that Russia is using "shadow tanker fleets" to circumvent a Western oil price cap, a watchdog committee of British lawmakers warned on Wednesday. Arguing Britain and its allies must maintain sanctions and military support for Ukraine for "as long as it takes," the panel from parliament's unelected upper House of Lords urged them to take "decisive action" over the issue. Read more | Subscribe to our channel

[agreenroad]

Tanker Rates To Haul Gasoline Soar 400% After Russian Sanctions | ZeroHedge

According to trading giant Trafigura, Russia relies on a “shadow fleet” of tankers to move crude and crude products. The trading firm said the fleet is about 600 ships.  Bloomberg said the surge in tanker rates has been “spurred in part by a bifurcation of the fleet with some tankers serving Moscow’s interests and others the international market. It highlights a possible flipside of aggressive…

[courtneytincher]

Could Iran Crush Great Britain in a War?

Which leaves naval and air power as the key factors. Like its tank fleet, the Iranian navy is a large hodgepodge of Russian, North Korean and indigenous designs, as well as old Western vessels from the 1960s and 1970s. But it does have dozens of missile and torpedo boats, as well as small craft equipped with rocket launchers and machine guns that could potentially overwhelm a larger but lone warship. Britain has a more conventional navy of high-tech destroyers, frigates and even a new aircraft carrier – but at 76 ships, the Royal Navy is but a shadow of its former glory.​“A comparison of the UK and Iran’s military strength shows Britain falling behind when it comes to manpower, land and naval strength and petroleum resources,” the newspaper proclaimed after Iran seized a British tanker in the Persian Gulf, in retaliation for Britain seizing an Iranian tanker at Gibraltar.The Daily Express article was based on GlobalFirepower.com, which features both statistics on the armed forces of 137 nations, and ranks those nations using a proprietary formula that apparently includes a nation’s population and military manpower, geographical size, financial strength, oil reserves, transportation infrastructure, and quantity of military hardware.(This first appeared earlier this month.)Britain ranks eighth on the “Global Firepower Index,” while Iran comes in not far behind in 14th place (the U.S. comes in first place, Israel 17th). Indeed, GlobalFirepower.com lists Iran as being stronger than Britain in several categories: 873,000 military personnel to Britain’s 233,000, 1,634 Iranian tanks to 331 British vehicles and 386 Iranian naval vessels to 76 British (Britain is credited with more airpower, with 811 military aircraft to 509 Iranian). Iran has more oil, but weaker finances.All of which proves how much statistics can be misleading. Britain and Iran are not in the same league at all.First and foremost, while Iran may or may not be developing nuclear weapons, Britain most certainly has them. And not some jury-rigged “physics package” assembled in an underground bunker, but four Vanguard-class nuclear submarines, each armed with 16 Trident thermonuclear-armed ballistic missiles. That’s enough atomic firepower to send Russia and China back to the Middle Ages, let alone Iran.However, Britain wouldn’t use nukes against Iran for political reasons, and Iran would be committing suicide to use them against Britain or anyone else. Which leaves the more immediate prospect of a limited conflict in the Persian Gulf, most likely a reprise of the 1980s “Tanker War,” in which Iran will attack or seize oil tankers in retaliation for economic sanctions, while Britain (and the U.S., and possibly Europe) will attempt to stop them.In which case, how many tanks Iran and Britain have doesn’t matter. Never mind that Britain’s Challenger 2 tanks are world-class vehicles that leave behind Iran’s larger but motley fleet of Russian, 1970s American and British, and indigenously manufactured tanks. But that’s not the point: Britain isn’t sending an armored division to invade Iran. And if it did, it would certainly be part of a multinational (mostly American) force.Which leaves naval and air power as the key factors. Like its tank fleet, the Iranian navy is a large hodgepodge of Russian, North Korean and indigenous designs, as well as old Western vessels from the 1960s and 1970s. But it does have dozens of missile and torpedo boats, as well as small craft equipped with rocket launchers and machine guns that could potentially overwhelm a larger but lone warship. Britain has a more conventional navy of high-tech destroyers, frigates and even a new aircraft carrier – but at 76 ships, the Royal Navy is but a shadow of its former glory. Currently, Britain is only sending a single destroyer and a frigate as convoy escorts in the Persian Gulf.Ditto in the air, where Iran’s museum mix of a handful of old American-made F-14 and F-4 fighters, Russian-made aircraft that fled from Iraq to Iran and were interned, and Iranian designs such as the Saeqeh, which looks remarkably like the F-5 fighters the U.S. sold to Iran in the 1970s. Britain has the advanced Eurofighter Typhoon, has now received its first F-35 stealth fighters, and can support its combat aircraft with an array of tankers, electronic warfare planes, and drones.But here is where numerical comparisons of military strength really fail. If Iran were to invade Britain, there would be no question of which party is stronger. However, in the Persian Gulf, British forces are operating 3,000 miles from the UK. Even with access to bases belonging to Iran’s hostile Arab neighbors, the British would still be operating in Iran’s home waters, where all the tools of coastal guerrilla warfare – mines, small boat attacks – would be available to Tehran.So is Britain or Iran stronger? It depends on the circumstances.Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.Image: Wikipedia.(This article was originally published earlier this month and is being republished due to reader interest.)

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Which leaves naval and air power as the key factors. Like its tank fleet, the Iranian navy is a large hodgepodge of Russian, North Korean and indigenous designs, as well as old Western vessels from the 1960s and 1970s. But it does have dozens of missile and torpedo boats, as well as small craft equipped with rocket launchers and machine guns that could potentially overwhelm a larger but lone warship. Britain has a more conventional navy of high-tech destroyers, frigates and even a new aircraft carrier – but at 76 ships, the Royal Navy is but a shadow of its former glory.​“A comparison of the UK and Iran’s military strength shows Britain falling behind when it comes to manpower, land and naval strength and petroleum resources,” the newspaper proclaimed after Iran seized a British tanker in the Persian Gulf, in retaliation for Britain seizing an Iranian tanker at Gibraltar.The Daily Express article was based on GlobalFirepower.com, which features both statistics on the armed forces of 137 nations, and ranks those nations using a proprietary formula that apparently includes a nation’s population and military manpower, geographical size, financial strength, oil reserves, transportation infrastructure, and quantity of military hardware.(This first appeared earlier this month.)Britain ranks eighth on the “Global Firepower Index,” while Iran comes in not far behind in 14th place (the U.S. comes in first place, Israel 17th). Indeed, GlobalFirepower.com lists Iran as being stronger than Britain in several categories: 873,000 military personnel to Britain’s 233,000, 1,634 Iranian tanks to 331 British vehicles and 386 Iranian naval vessels to 76 British (Britain is credited with more airpower, with 811 military aircraft to 509 Iranian). Iran has more oil, but weaker finances.All of which proves how much statistics can be misleading. Britain and Iran are not in the same league at all.First and foremost, while Iran may or may not be developing nuclear weapons, Britain most certainly has them. And not some jury-rigged “physics package” assembled in an underground bunker, but four Vanguard-class nuclear submarines, each armed with 16 Trident thermonuclear-armed ballistic missiles. That’s enough atomic firepower to send Russia and China back to the Middle Ages, let alone Iran.However, Britain wouldn’t use nukes against Iran for political reasons, and Iran would be committing suicide to use them against Britain or anyone else. Which leaves the more immediate prospect of a limited conflict in the Persian Gulf, most likely a reprise of the 1980s “Tanker War,” in which Iran will attack or seize oil tankers in retaliation for economic sanctions, while Britain (and the U.S., and possibly Europe) will attempt to stop them.In which case, how many tanks Iran and Britain have doesn’t matter. Never mind that Britain’s Challenger 2 tanks are world-class vehicles that leave behind Iran’s larger but motley fleet of Russian, 1970s American and British, and indigenously manufactured tanks. But that’s not the point: Britain isn’t sending an armored division to invade Iran. And if it did, it would certainly be part of a multinational (mostly American) force.Which leaves naval and air power as the key factors. Like its tank fleet, the Iranian navy is a large hodgepodge of Russian, North Korean and indigenous designs, as well as old Western vessels from the 1960s and 1970s. But it does have dozens of missile and torpedo boats, as well as small craft equipped with rocket launchers and machine guns that could potentially overwhelm a larger but lone warship. Britain has a more conventional navy of high-tech destroyers, frigates and even a new aircraft carrier – but at 76 ships, the Royal Navy is but a shadow of its former glory. Currently, Britain is only sending a single destroyer and a frigate as convoy escorts in the Persian Gulf.Ditto in the air, where Iran’s museum mix of a handful of old American-made F-14 and F-4 fighters, Russian-made aircraft that fled from Iraq to Iran and were interned, and Iranian designs such as the Saeqeh, which looks remarkably like the F-5 fighters the U.S. sold to Iran in the 1970s. Britain has the advanced Eurofighter Typhoon, has now received its first F-35 stealth fighters, and can support its combat aircraft with an array of tankers, electronic warfare planes, and drones.But here is where numerical comparisons of military strength really fail. If Iran were to invade Britain, there would be no question of which party is stronger. However, in the Persian Gulf, British forces are operating 3,000 miles from the UK. Even with access to bases belonging to Iran’s hostile Arab neighbors, the British would still be operating in Iran’s home waters, where all the tools of coastal guerrilla warfare – mines, small boat attacks – would be available to Tehran.So is Britain or Iran stronger? It depends on the circumstances.Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook.Image: Wikipedia.(This article was originally published earlier this month and is being republished due to reader interest.)

August 23, 2019 at 01:00PM via IFTTT

[in4matn]

US Naval collision should worry Trump’s Asian allies

The USS John S McCain’s fatal crash, the fourth US naval accident in a year, makes America look inconsistent and unreliable – much like the president himself.

The dismissal of Joseph Aucoin, commander of the US 7th Fleet, is more formal than practical as Aucoin was close to retirement anyway. But heads had to roll after a series of accidents, including two recent fatal collisions. Military responsibility is what it is; in the end the top man had to take the rap. More surprising than Aucoin’s dismissal, perhaps, is that he did not submit his resignation as a matter of honour first. When it was reported this week that a US navy destroyer had been involved in a collision with an oil tanker near Singapore and 10 US crew members were missing, it was hard to believe that this was not old news being reheated. Had we not been here before? Only two months ago, seven US crew members died when the USS Fitzgerald warship collided with a container ship in Japanese waters near the US naval base at Yokosuka. It turned out, however, that this latest incident was another collision between a US naval vessel and a civilian ship in the Pacific. This accident occurred to the east of Singapore and, like the earlier collision, it happened at night. As with the previous incident, too, at least some of the crew members were killed when their sealed sleeping compartments were flooded. If one fatal accident involving the US 7th Fleet could – generously, perhaps – be regarded as a misfortune, a second looks a great deal worse than carelessness. For the US, the latest incident would also have had particular resonance because the ship involved is the USS John S McCain, named in honour of the distinguished father and grandfather of Senator John McCain, who has become the voice of political reason and principle in the early months of a presidency that has been anything but. Two accidents in two months would be bad enough. But it does not stop there. In May, a guided missile cruiser collided with a South Korean fishing vessel, and last August a US submarine collided with a support vessel. That is four incidents in just over a year. No wonder, then, that the 7th Fleet commander’s head is on the block, or that the chief of naval operations, Admiral John Richardson, has ordered a worldwide “operational pause” of its whole fleet. All commanders have been instructed to halt operations to “assess and review with their commands the fundamental practice to safe and effective operations”. A review is also under way to find out what caused the various accidents. So far, the official presumption appears to be that human error was the most likely cause. Disciplinary measures were announced last week against the captain and crew of the USS Fitzgerald. In an intriguing glimpse of other possibilities, however, Richardson said on Twitter – the favoured public medium since Donald Trump became president – that he would not exclude the possibility of some kind of outside interference or cyberattack as a cause. It is understandable that those in charge of the most powerful navy in the world, let alone those whose security it is entrusted with protecting, find it hard to believe that morale or discipline have become so diminished as to make even this relatively small number of incidents possible. And it is all too tempting to believe that someone – China would be the favoured candidate, given the region and the capability, though North Korea and Russia could also be in the frame – might have been able to tamper somehow with the GPS or other technology in such a way as to make an incident more likely. Particular tensions over Chinese claims to control routes in the South China Sea or friction with North Korea over its nuclear programme have recently flared to unprecedented levels. In many ways, though, the immediate cause of this spate of incidents matters less than the shadow it casts over the operational competence of a key part of the US defence sector – and by far the most powerful navy in the world. At a time when there is a president in the White House whose decisions appear inconsistent, verging on flaky, it is more important than ever that key institutions of state, starting with the military, appear solid and reliable. In this respect, it is not just the US that the 7th Fleet has let down, but Washington’s allies in Asia, too.

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[mariacallous]

The use of a covert “shadow fleet” by Moscow to transport oil in defiance of western sanctions will be a primary focus during discussions between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy in London this week. The talks are set to take place ahead of US President Joe Biden’s meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Washington.

According to The Guardian, Russia has been using older, uninsured tankers to move oil and liquefied natural gas outside the framework of western sanctions. These vessels operate without western insurance and have been involved in risky ship-to-ship oil transfers near international waters, including off the eastern coast of Sweden. This activity is part of an effort to bypass a $60-a-barrel price cap imposed by the West on Russian oil exports, a measure designed to limit Moscow’s revenues without causing a spike in global oil prices.

Despite the sanctions, a recent study by the Kyiv School of Economics revealed that Russia’s oil revenues reached $17.1 billion in July due to rising oil prices and insufficient enforcement of the price cap. The report also highlighted that while 307 tankers transported Russian crude from January 2023 to June 2024, only a small fraction of these ships have been sanctioned by the US, EU, or UK.

Efforts to disrupt this shadow fleet have been slow. In July, Starmer led an international call at the European Political Community summit in Blenheim to increase pressure on countries allowing these tankers to operate under their flags. However, the number of tankers evading sanctions has not significantly decreased.

The US and UK are expected to discuss further strategies to strengthen enforcement and pressure flag states, ports, and maritime industries to limit the fleet’s activities. One recent success saw Eswatini, a landlocked African state, dismantle its ship registry used for flagging tankers linked to this shadow fleet, following action from the International Maritime Organization.

Earlier reports indicated that Russia’s efforts to use the shadow fleet to bypass sanctions have led to a rise in illegal oil shipments. Studies showed that a significant portion of these tankers are registered in countries such as Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands, with key destinations being India, China, and Turkey, reflecting a shift from traditional EU markets.

[mariacallous]

Thanks to hundreds of old tankers, Russia manages to sell oil worldwide, earning up to a third of its budget from this trade.

Until February 2022, Russia was a full-fledged member of the global oil market, exporting its oil products to numerous countries under generally accepted rules. However, after the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sanctions were imposed on the industry, and several countries stopped accepting Russian oil. This hurt the industry, prompting the Kremlin to take measures to save it. One such measure was the creation of a shadow fleet to transport Russian oil. So what is the shadow fleet, and what threats does it pose?

What Is the Shadow Fleet?

The term "shadow fleet" is somewhat arbitrary. It refers to vessels, usually oil tankers, with complex ownership structures that often turn off their location transponders or even falsify their coordinates during voyages. This fleet is often divided into "gray" and "dark" categories, depending on certain characteristics and the type of oil they carry. The "gray" fleet typically hides the owner, while the "dark" fleet hides the origin of the oil products. All other fleets are considered "clean" or "cleared fleet."

The concept of a "shadow fleet" existed before Russia began using it. It was initially used to describe tankers transporting oil from Iran and Venezuela when those countries faced sanctions on oil exports.

Characteristics of the Shadow Fleet:

Lack of Insurance: These ships often do not have insurance from reputable British insurers, and some have no insurance at all. This creates the risk that in case of an accident, there would be no party responsible for addressing the environmental consequences like an oil spill.

Aging Vessels: These tankers are typically old, making accidents a matter of time. VOX reports that for the first time in years, maritime safety conditions have deteriorated rather than improved. Despite this, demand for such tankers remains due to the availability of buyers.

Restricted Access: Without insurance and facing sanctions, these vessels are barred from some ports, leading them to conduct oil transfers at sea, mixing Russian oil with oil from other countries to obscure its origin. Such at-sea transfers are considered a potential source of accidents.

Estimates suggest that 10% to 18% of the world’s tankers make up the shadow fleet. With around 9,800 to over 12,000 tankers globally, about 1,500 to 1,800 belong to the shadow fleet.

How Many Tankers Are Involved in Russia’s Shadow Fleet?

The exact number of tankers involved in transporting Russian oil is unknown, as estimates vary. The construction of this fleet began at the end of 2022 when Russian oil companies started buying old tankers to form their own fleet. Prices for a single tanker ranged from $35 million and up, depending on the urgency and the seller's willingness to transfer the vessel to Russia.

By the end of 2022, Russia reportedly had over 200 tankers. By March 2023, CNN reported about 600 tankers of various capacities. Today, Russia may directly or indirectly control 1,400 to 1,800 tankers, making it the largest operator of a shadow fleet.

It’s important to note that not all of these vessels are constantly transporting Russian oil. Experts include a tanker in the count if it has even once transported Russian oil, violating the imposed restrictions, such as the $60 per barrel price cap aimed at limiting Russia's foreign exchange earnings used to fund its military and the war.

What Threats Does the Shadow Fleet Pose?

One of the primary concerns is the lack of insurance coverage in case of accidents, raising the potential for ecological disasters. Legitimate fleets are insured by major internationally recognized insurers, ensuring clear plans for addressing accidents and providing compensation. The shadow fleet, however, is often insured by local companies with limited coverage. For example, Russian insurer "Ingosstrakh" may cancel insurance if a tanker is found to be carrying oil sold above the price cap.

This makes the issue of compensation for potential accidents more of a formality. This is especially concerning in the Mediterranean Sea, where many oil transfers between tankers take place. Experts also point to risks in the Baltic Sea, where Russia's shadow fleet operates and where there has already been an accident involving an empty tanker, which mitigated the potential damage.

After the introduction of the price cap on Russian oil, the volume of oil transported by the shadow fleet increased, as Russia sought new ways to bypass sanctions. This has led to the emergence of a shadow market, undermining global efforts to improve economic and maritime safety. Such schemes also impact tax collection, facilitate money laundering, and lead to funds being deposited in offshore accounts.

Russia continues to use its oil revenues to fund the war, investing the profits into building a militarized economy that supports its full-scale war in Ukraine. Experts note that this impacts not only Europe but the global community. A tougher stance against the shadow fleet and secondary sanctions targeting individual entities like shipowners and ports, as well as entire countries that assist Russia, could be a potential solution.

In conclusion, the shadow fleet helps Russia maintain its oil exports worldwide, particularly to China and India (with 82% of its exports going to Asia-Pacific regions) and facilitates oil transfers in the Mediterranean. Through the shadow fleet, Russia can bypass restrictions and present its oil as originating from other sources. For instance, a Russian tanker can transfer oil to another tanker at sea, deliver it to a refinery in a third country, which then sells the refined product as its own—making the oil Russian in practice, but not in name.

It’s worth noting that oil and gas revenues currently make up at least a third of Russia’s budget, roughly equivalent to what it plans to spend on the war in 2024.

What Are the Threats of the Shadow Fleet?

One of the main threats highlighted by the international community is the issue of insurance in case of accidents, which poses potential environmental risks. The "clean" fleet is insured by large, internationally recognized insurers, ensuring a clear action plan in the event of accidents and a source of compensation for dealing with potential incidents. In contrast, the shadow fleet is often insured by local companies with limited coverage. The Financial Times provides examples of Russian insurers explicitly stating that compensation may not be paid if environmental damage occurs. An example is the Russian insurer "Ingosstrakh," which issues insurance to the Russian shadow fleet but will cancel coverage if it is discovered that the tanker is carrying oil sold above the price cap.

As a result, insurance coverage—and thus compensation for potential accidents—is more of a formality. This is particularly concerning for the Mediterranean Sea, as oil transfers between tankers often occur there. Experts also point to risks in the Baltic Sea, where Russia’s shadow fleet operates, and where there has already been an accident, although the tanker involved was empty, preventing a disaster.

Sanctions also play a significant role. After the introduction of the price cap on Russian oil, the volume of oil transported by the shadow fleet increased, with Russia increasingly seeking ways to circumvent sanctions. This has led to the creation of an entire shadow market that runs counter to the global community's efforts to improve safety and economic conditions, particularly at sea. These schemes affect tax payments, facilitate money laundering, and result in funds being deposited in offshore accounts.

Finally, there is the issue that Russia continues to fund the war using oil revenues, channeling profits into building a militarized economy, which has led to the full-scale war in Ukraine. Experts understand that all of this affects Europe and the global community as a whole. A possible solution could be a tougher stance against the shadow fleet and secondary sanctions, targeting specific legal entities like shipowners or ports, as well as entire countries that assist Russia.

[mariacallous]

Almost two and half years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s war machine still runs on energy revenues—despite unprecedented Western sanctions that took a bite out of, but hardly battered, the Kremlin’s cash cow.

Russian exports of oil, natural gas, and coal continue apace with their biggest markets in Asia, especially China and India. Even Europe, which has largely sworn off Russian gas since the invasion, is stealthily buying a lot more of the stuff off tankers to meet its own energy needs, indirectly helping finance the invader that it spends so much time, energy, and money trying to combat. 

Russian energy export revenues before the war were about 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) a day, and the whole gamut of sanctions had brought that down to about 660 million euros ($720 million) by this June—but those levels have stayed remarkably steady for the past 18 months. Russia recorded a rare current accounts surplus just last month, a sign of that export health. The sanctions battle, like the war itself, seems to have stalemated.

“The glass is neither half full, nor half empty. The sanctions are working, but not as well as we expected,” said Petras Katinas, an energy analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

Some aspects of Russia’s energy exports have fallen off a cliff, such as its exports of natural gas via pipelines, which have all but disappeared from the lucrative European market. But the country’s exports of oil and refined oil products, which make up the biggest chunk of its sales, have stayed essentially the same after an initial hit in the first months after the introduction of Western sanctions, and state earnings even crept a little higher thanks to a rise in global oil prices.

The main Western effort to curb Russian energy earnings was a balancing act meant to keep the global market supplied while limiting the Kremlin’s take by capping Russian oil sales at $60 a barrel. Some countries wanted an even lower price cap of about $30 a barrel to really cut Moscow’s earnings, but that idea—as demonstrated when Ukraine floated it again this spring—was politically and diplomatically a lot tougher. 

Still, the original price cap worked great at first, until Russia—with a little help from its friends in OPEC—goosed the global price of oil higher, which dragged the price of discounted Russian oil above the cap as well. That’s pretty much where it has been for the past year.

More importantly, Russia has found a reliable way to sidestep that formal limit on its crude oil exports by using a fleet of so-called shadow tankers that don’t have to follow Western restrictions on insurance, safety, and the like. About 4 out of every 5 barrels of seaborne crude that Russia sells are now carried on shadow tankers, Katinas said, meaning that they are entirely outside the reach of Western measures. (Those shadow tankers aren’t beyond the reach of the Iran-backed Houthi insurgents in Yemen, though: One got blown up trying to take Russian oil to China this week.)

“The strategy was good, but the tactics were poor—there was little enforcement,” Katinas said.

The United States cracked down on part of that trade a couple of times—late last year on shadow tankers and earlier this year on Russian state-owned vessels—by sanctioning individual tankers; CREA estimates that tougher enforcement probably cost Russia about 5 percentof its oil export revenues since October 2023. But there is still a long way to go to ensure thorough enforcement of the existing limits on Russian oil trade: Full enforcement would have kept almost 20 billion euros ($21.8 billion) out of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s coffers, CREA estimates. 

The Biden administration has toyed with additional efforts to tighten the screws on the shadow fleet, but it worries that stricter measures might send oil (and gasoline) prices higher just in time for a pivotal U.S. presidential election in November.

But there is a way to get there without causing much pain, if any, for global energy consumers, argue global economy experts Robin Brooks and Ben Harris of the Brookings Institution. There remain some 100-odd unsanctioned ships in the Sovcomflot state-owned fleet that are doing heavy lifting for Russian oil exports. Targeted sanctions on just 15 of the busiest of those tankers would cut into a good-sized chunk of Russia’s oil export earnings with little market impact. “With such a process in place, we anticipate little to no impact on global oil prices but suspect the action will meaningfully lower Russia’s revenue from the oil trade,” they wrote.

But it’s not just oil. Russian natural gas exports are not dead yet, either, despite lots of pain for state-owned energy company Gazprom and plenty of crowing in Europe about largely weaning itself off of what used to be its biggest energy supplier. Some European countries, including Hungary, Austria, and Slovakia, are still heavily reliant on the remnants of Russian gas that arrive via Ukraine or Turkey, for reasons that range from the geographic to the political. 

What’s amazing about the sharp decline in exports of Russian natural gas to what was formerly the nation’s biggest market is that Russian natural gas is not sanctioned in Europe at all, yet it has suffered the most of all of Moscow’s energy streams.

“Gas is not sanctioned; it was the stupidity of Putin” that drove the Europeans off of it, Katinas said.

But this year, Russian gas is sneaking back into Europe in liquefied form, supercooled and shipped on tankers rather than compressed and routed through pipelines. European Union imports of Russian liquefied natural gas, or LNG, are up 24 percent over past year, especially to big Western European countries such as France, Spain, and Belgium; the bloc buys half of all Russian LNG exports. 

There are plenty of reasons why—Spain’s main suppliers in North Africa have their own geopolitical squabbles that have disrupted exports, long-term contracts with Russia essentially lock in some European buyers for years, and Russian gas is nearby and fairly cheap compared to alternatives—but the biggest reason is simply concern over the security of supplies.

“There was lots of talk even last year about banning LNG imports, but then what prevailed were the fears about the implications for the security of supply,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a gas expert at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. The trickle of Russian gas that still comes in through Ukraine will end later this year; Turkey, despite offers to do more, can hardly export significantly more gas to southern Europe since it isn’t a gas producer itself. And Europeans remember the shock and pain of the war’s first winter, when energy prices skyrocketed due to the upheavals in the gas market.

Last month, the European Union finally took its first step to deal with Russian LNG—not by banning the import of the fuel, but by making sure that European ports would not be waystations for Russian exports to Asia. That measure won’t even start until early next year. And there certainly won’t be any further EU efforts to target Russian gas this year, with Hungary at the helm of the rotating presidency of the EU council.

“We are not actually banning imports, but preventing other countries from getting Russian LNG,” Corbeau said. “It makes life more difficult for Russia’s Asia exports, but does nothing to keep LNG out of Europe.”

The good news, such as it is, is that LNG isn’t quite the cash cow for the Russian government that other energy sources are. Oil is sold in huge volumes and is taxed; pipeline gas, too, helps prop up the federal budget. But LNG has all sorts of tax breaks that mean much less of that Western money goes straight to the Ukrainian battlefront. In terms of how to target Russian energy earnings, Corbeau said, “first oil, then piped gas, then finally LNG.”

The bad news is that despite years of unprecedented sanctions on one of the world’s biggest energy providers, Russia’s cash machine is still working enough to continue underwriting the war. The relatively limited success in the battle against the country’s energy sector is mirrored by similar failings in cracking down on Russian trade in all sorts of other things, from Western machinery routed through Central Asia to the high-tech Chinese-made components needed for the war. 

“We are not doing enough. We need to strengthen sanctions—we need to start enforcing sanctions, and start punishing companies that are violating them,” said Katinas. “There are just too many loopholes.”

[mariacallous]

Despite international sanctions, petrodollars continue to flow into Russia’s budget — primarily thanks to a “shadow fleet” that ships Russian oil to buyers willing to pay prices above the $60 per barrel cap imposed by the G7+ Coalition. As The Insider found, a central role in this arrangement belongs to Latvian citizen Aleksejs Haļavins, as two entities affiliated with the businessman are known to have purchased oil from Russian oil company Surgutneftegaz at a price above the cap, bringing the Russian corporation an additional $1.4 billion. Other companies linked with Haļavins operated tankers carrying oil from Russia to India and China. Notably, Israel has accused one of these tankers of supplying oil to Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iran's Quds Force. The Insider traced Haļavins’s connection to Russian national Mikhail Silantiev, the former head of Promsyrioimport — a state-owned company sanctioned on two counts: for supplying fuel to Crimea and for supplying oil to Syria.

[mariacallous]

Small European states, such as Denmark, face daily the threat of an environmental Armageddon, as dozens of decrepit, single-hulled, barely insured Russian oil tankers wend their way through the narrowest of straits to the open seas. Often they don’t even have local pilots to help them navigate the treacherous waters, let alone proper paperwork, further raising the consequences of a disastrous oil spill.

What makes this traffic especially galling is that it is done illegally, in circumvention of near-universal sanctions, and in service of a criminal state whose oil exports serve to underwrite the extermination of a neighboring country. The United States and, most recently, the United Kingdom have sanctioned a handful of those tankers, but the trade continues. On paper, coastal states could—and might yet—take action to stop that trade. In practice, Russia is a very big country that brandishes nuclear threats with abandon. 

“The question is, what risk does that traffic pose? As a person living just down the hill from the strait, that of course poses an environmental risk if we have a problem,” said Kristina Siig, a Danish resident of the straits, and, as it happens, an expert on maritime law. 

What’s a state to do? On the one hand, international law gives coastal states the right to take action against ships that pose grave environmental risks, as the rusting Russian shadow fleet almost certainly does. There are several explicit articles in the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)—the global constitution of maritime law—that seem to offer coastal states a way to curb shipping that poses a serious risk to the environment.

On the other hand, commercial traffic through the Danish straits is sacrosanct under international law. If UNCLOS isn’t clear enough on that point, lawyers will happily point you to the 1857 Copenhagen Convention that guarantees the right of innocent passage through the Danish straits for commercial ships. 

The big problem is that Russian oil exports are not, in layman’s terms if not legalese, “innocent passage.” They are outlaw ships doing outlaw business and carrying dangerous cargo to boot. International law, and maritime law in particular, is rich in verbiage and caveats. What it is often short of, in Western eyes and practice, is common sense. Now, some countries are looking to take a more proactive approach to turn the letter of the law into a way to bring the lawless to heel.

In June, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said that Denmark and some other Western countries are exploring ways to limit, if not entirely stop, the dangerous traffic of Russia’s shadow fleet through the one exit from the Baltic Sea, specifically by invoking some form of coastal state rights to prevent environmental harms. Parallel plans reportedly under development include ways to partially limit the unfettered passage of ships that don’t comply with international maritime regulations, from ship safety to oil-spill insurance; other plans would use the sanctioning power of the U.S. Treasury to put teeth in shadow fleet enforcement.

With local plans yet to fully materialize, Denmark did feel emboldened in late summer to put an end to Russian ships getting port service on their way out of the straits, backed by the latest European Union sanctions package that allowed those restrictions. 

And the United Kingdom in July announced a “call to action,” endorsed by 43 other states and the EU, that would use stricter enforcement of International Maritime Organization rules to check the shadow fleet’s depredations. Specifically, Britain wants “flag states,” the countries that officially register a ship and are responsible for its operation, to clean up their act and enforce safety and insurance rules. And it wants port states to crack down on illegal transfers of cargoes and dodgy insurance practices that deliberately evade the near-universal adherence to maritime norms.

“There is no doubt that Russia is flagrantly breaking the law, so if the allies are working together to ratchet up the legal response, that is entirely understandable,” said Harold Koh, a professor at Yale Law School and a former legal advisor to the U.S. State Department.

But it’s not clear that even the black letter of maritime law that gives coastal states rights against environmental threats would be enough to curtail Russia’s shadow fleet, said Siig, who is a professor of maritime law at the University of Southern Denmark. Forcing compliance with insurance rules, for instance, could add burdens to Russia’s makeshift fleet but likely wouldn’t stop it. And any effort to plug the straits would run into equally valid legal protections, long defended by Denmark, of free passage through those very same waters.

“I see this as more of a diplomatic problem than a strict legal problem,” she said. “If you want to stop Russian oil from coming through the straits, forget it.”

Legal fig leaves aside, Russia would not be happy.

“This would be a legal charade, and seen as such,” said Sergey Vakulenko, an energy expert at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a former Russian oil executive. He said even a legalistic effort to restrict traffic through the straits would undermine international law and potentially be seen as a blockade—a potential act of war—by Russia.

Or as Siig puts it: Even if Denmark and some allies were to muster the legal arguments to go after that illicit trade, Russia remains as physically close as it was during the atomic-frightened years of the Cold War.

“If you are going to poke a bear, do it with a very long stick,” she said.

The search for legal remedies to bad actors isn’t limited to shadow fleets, or even to Russia. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and others for some war crimes already; the West has tied itself in knots to justify first the freeze, and now a partial seizure, of Russia’s huge overseas central bank reserves. The Philippines took China to court over its maritime depredations years ago and won handily. 

But maritime law is such an important battlefield because the seas and oceans are so central to the modern world.

Take the undersea cables and pipelines that form the central nervous system of the global economy. That sprawling infrastructure is a particular target for Russia, which when not attacking those structures directly or indirectly is mapping them out for the future. NATO, the CIA, MI6, and others are growing more concerned by the day about the vulnerability of European infrastructure in particular to Russian sabotage.

But the 40-year-old constitution of the sea has little to say about protecting now-vital assets. The only parties that have jurisdiction if something goes wrong—if a Chinese ship damages a crucial energy pipeline between two European states, say—are the wrongdoers themselves; coastal states have no clear legal remedies as yet. The flag state that is legally responsible for a ship, whether a true maritime nation like the United Kingdom or a black-flag state for rent like Gabon, is the one with jurisdiction over such incidents.

International legal experts have spent years trying to update the dated provisions on UNCLOS, which has plenty to say about the environment, to create a new regime that will address broader concerns about protecting vital maritime areas. Other suggestions include a more expansive definition of the UNCLOS term “marine environment” to protect against more than just pollution. But although that might work to cover damaged oil pipelines, it would hardly apply to severed data cables. 

Legal scholars are working to identify what kind of tools, from existing provisions of UNCLOS to the rules about self-defense from attack, might apply to protect those assets from the kind of hybrid warfare that is now endemic upon, and under, the seas.

“The Law of the Sea Convention did not foresee such a manipulation of the law, and outright sabotage of objects of critical infrastructure, such as submarine cables and pipelines,” said Alexander Lott of the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea at the Arctic University of Norway, who literally wrote the book on maritime law and hybrid warfare.

With formal updates to the sprawling UNCLOS unlikely—the massive treaty took a decade to finish its third negotiation and become law, and further amendments now would be a legal morass—one alternative might be new customary law, rather than a revised treaty. 

Denmark itself stretched legal imagination to create exclusion zones around the damaged Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic. New customary law could gain legal force, said Jacques Hartmann, an international law expert at the University of Dundee and a former legal advisor to the Danish Foreign Ministry, “if enough states came out and said, ‘Subsea infrastructure is part of our national security.’ Whether or not there is the political will to do so is less clear.”

Other scholars reach for different potential legal remedies for what is, essentially, piratical behavior. For centuries, states have known how to combat piracy, even if they have often had trouble defining just what a pirate is at any given time. The British Admiralty historically embraced expansive definitions of piracy and its national prerogatives to protect what it saw as its vital maritime interests, noted Daniel Skeffington in the Naval Review. Some scholars are starting to suggest that an updated definition of piracy might be a way to combat severed cables (if not severed thumbs), as the United States sought to do back in the 19th century to protect telegraph lines.

The piracy provisions of international maritime law, said Hartmann, were “drafted at a time when piracy was a historical crime.” But piracy evolved in the very years UNCLOS was drafted and even after. The international community found another way to codify action against air pirates and later more traditional maritime pirates; many of those same international understandings underpinned the global fight against terrorism, which he suggested is a useful template for understanding and combating the new type of threat.

“Every once in a while, it becomes clear having a free-for-all area of lawlessness is not that useful,” Hartmann said.

But if it is hard to even define the kind of gray-zone tactics increasingly used by states like Russia, it is even harder to pinpoint ironclad legal remedies. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

“Hybrid warfare tends to target the gray zones of the legal system. It is reliant on the very indeterminacies rooted in the law, so there is no silver bullet to fight it,” Lott said. “But victims need to be more assertive in enforcing their laws,” even if there is not a single “specific and crystal-clear legal basis for any particular action they might take.”

The reticence with which Western states approach the possible weaponization of international law is deep-rooted. International law was conceived in Latin and is practiced in English. Western states by and large seek to uphold the girders of the international system they built and from which they benefit (except when pointedly attacking bits of it, such as the ICC, or refusing to join its biggest groupings altogether, such as UNCLOS).

Big revisionist states don’t have those reservations. Russia has trampled not only the spirit of international law but the letter as well, not just with shadow fleets and sabotage, or war crimes various; when scholars point to piratical behavior and talk about taking a gloves-off approach to wrongdoers at sea, they often cite Russia’s own illegal actions, such as the 2018 detention of Ukrainian sailors in the Black Sea before the latest war even began. 

China’s Foreign Ministry explicitly makes the weaponization of international law to advance Beijing’s interests a centerpiece of its foreign policy, continuing a centurylong legal tradition meant to undo “unequal treaties” by turning the West’s preferred tool against it. That explains much of China’s legally baseless and indisputably dangerous behavior over the last decade-plus in waters such as the South China Sea. (China’s own vision of a modern navy includes a very muscular approach to maritime law and ocean governance.)

When it comes to specific remedies for specific problems, such as plugging the one exit Russia’s illicit oil fleet has from the closed waters of the Baltic, those philosophical constraints end up hamstringing policy. Denmark and other coastal states are leery about actively using even defensible chapter and verse of international law to protect their coasts not just out of fear of Russian reprisals, but because undermining even one brick of the edifice of international law could boomerang.

“Freedom of navigation, and the whole of maritime commerce, is reliant on the straits regime” that allows free passage, Lott said. “If they were to do anything to clearly violate the regime, then they would essentially shoot themselves in the foot and provide arguments for other states that might not be interested in freedom of navigation, and this would create a tremendous headache for Western states. This is what explains the hesitant behavior.”

But that is what makes the nascent green shoots of Western weaponization of law to combat particular bad actors so encouraging. Seen as less a straitjacket than a ripcord, international law, properly applied and politically supported, could go some way toward turning the black letter of the law into a useful tool to chase black flags from the sea.

“The trick is to find the more nuanced approach,” Lott concluded, “to use legal measures without undermining the legal principles.”

[mariacallous]

Officially, the shadow fleet doesn’t exist. These rickety, uninsured vessels, running oil from Russia to China, India, and others, live off-book as they cruise the world’s oceans to dodge sanctions.

But they’re all too real, as Russia’s maritime neighbors have painfully discovered. I’ve written about the risk of disastrous oil spills as these shadow vessels pass through Denmark’s treacherous Great Belt. In recent weeks, they have begun conducting a lot of their business just outside the Swedish Baltic Sea island of Gotland. That offers the unorthodox possibility of two unlikely allies joining forces: NATO and environmental groups such as Greenpeace. Neither wants to see oil spilt from crumbling hulks into Europe’s waters.

The shadow vessels travel through the waters of countries that have no oil dealings with Russia but foot the bill each time one of these vessels has an accident in their waters. Last month, the shadow oil tanker Andromeda Star, which is, as is normal for shadow vessels, managed by an obscure firm and was sold to undisclosed buyers at the end of 2023, hit a cargo vessel just off the coast of Denmark.

Ordinarily, the tanker’s insurance would have covered the incident. But because the Andromeda Star is a shadow vessel, it lacked the Western insurance that is the industry standard. Instead, it is insured by a mysterious Russian outfit that’s unlikely to pay out a single krone. Denmark’s taxpayers may never recover the money the authorities spent attending to the incident. Fortunately, the Andromeda Star had its accident while traveling to Russia, its tanks empty—or the consequences could have been far worse.

As I’ve written for Foreign Policy, when Russian shadow vessels sail from Baltic Sea ports out to the Atlantic, they typically pass through the Great Belt. And because many of them refuse pilotage, the risk of accidents is enormous. Yet under international maritime rules, Denmark can’t bar these risky vessels from entering. On April 3, a sanctioned shadow tanker that appears to lack insurance and had been deflagged by Liberia sailed, Lloyd’s List Intelligence reports, from the Russian fuel terminal Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea through the strait between Denmark and Sweden on to the North Sea and the Mediterranean.

Now Swedish authorities are concerned, too. In recent weeks, Russian shadow vessels have taken to positioning themselves just off the island of Gotland. Or rather, they place themselves just outside the 12-nautical-mile line that marks a country’s territorial waters. But even outside territorial waters, coastal states have an exclusive economic zone where they own the natural resources—and it’s those resources that are now in danger.

The Russian ships are there to conduct ship-to-ship (STS) transfers, the highly hazardous business of transferring oil from one vessel to another. The Swedish public broadcaster SVT has tracked vessels sailing from the Russian port of Primorsk and the Ust-Luga fuel terminal to the waters off eastern Gotland, where they meet up with another tanker, the Zircone.

Swedish officials told me that Gabon, the shadow fleet’s flag state of choice, is suddenly all over Swedish waters. “We have a front-row seat watching the shadow fleet in operation,” a senior Swedish official said. Like Denmark, Sweden faces being subjected to oil spills that will harm its maritime environment and cause considerable work for the authorities and expense to the taxpayer. “For many years, STS has been a huge problem in Denmark, too,” said retired Rear Adm. Nils Wang, a former chief of the Royal Danish Navy. “The risk of oil spills is considerable. But we found out that there was nothing we could do about the STS.”

Oil spills caused by a hostile country illegally operating merchant vessels are not a military attack. But the vessels are indisputably harmful not just to Sweden and Denmark but also to Finland, Estonia, Norway, and other NATO member states whose waters they traverse. Indeed, as I argued in January, Russia could instruct shadow vessels to deliberately cause harm—a cheap and easy way of hurting NATO member states. (It doesn’t help that the Zircone belongs to the Latvian company Fastbunkering, which is itself owned by an Estonian firm.)

Environmental crimes are clearly not NATO’s remit, but local authorities can only investigate once an accident happens. And they won’t be able to deter the activity. When researching this article, I thought of something a Japanese journalist asked me: “Couldn’t Greenpeace do something?”

Of course it could! And before I had finished entertaining this thought, the environmental campaign organization did. On April 12, Greenpeace activists turned up in small boats at the Zircone’s waiting spot off Gotland and painted “Oil Is War” and “People Want Peace” on the tanker’s hull. Suddenly, the whole region knew that Russian shadow vessels had turned the waters off Gotland into a hub for hazardous oil activities.

“This [the shadow fleet] is as wrong as it gets. Not only does the shadow fleet constitute an immediate environmental threat, it is also fuelling Russia’s war on Ukraine,” Rolf Lindahl, Greenpeace Nordic’s peace and energy campaigner, said in a press release. “Our mission at the moment is to bring attention to this problem and put pressure on our governments to stop the shadow vessels,” Lindahl told me by phone. “Ever since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we’ve been bringing attention to Russia’s transport of fossil fuels. It’s a big problem for our region, especially since so much of Russia’s shadow fleet sails through the Baltic Sea.”

Greenpeace has a long history of activism at sea—directed against nuclear weapons, whaling, and much more—as well as its own small boats. That has put it in the firing line in the past, as when the French security service blew up a Greenpeace boat in New Zealand, killing one person. Ideologically, Greenpeace is often at odds with NATO and its members, but when it comes to the shadow fleet, they are, so to speak, in the same boat. Yes, NATO and Greenpeace would be highly unlikely to officially join forces, but both want the dirty boats gone.

“It would be extremely difficult for NATO to team up with Greenpeace since Greenpeace’s position is that they don’t work with authorities,” Wang noted. “It would have to be an unspoken alliance, with the authorities not intervening whenever Greenpeace decided to spray-paint shadow vessels. As authorities, what we can do is put the binoculars to our blind eye when they target shadow vessels.” Military vessels, for their part, could patrol the waters frequented by shadow vessels. Both actions would cast unwanted attention on those who want to harm the planet in obscurity.

Greenpeace and other activist outfits could also help by identifying and outing the shadowy entities that own the shadow vessels. (Such shaming would convince many a shadowy owner that the shadow fleet isn’t worth the effort.) And analysts at NATO, Greenpeace, and beyond could send the International Maritime Organization (IMO) details about suspected shadow vessels.

Armed with such data, the IMO could create a list of vessels that bear the shadow fleet’s trademarks of poor insurance, obscure ownership, regular signals gaps, and frequently changing flag registration. “Shadow vessel destinations like India may not have a clear picture of which vessels that arrive in their ports are shadow vessels,” Wang said. “And India is surely not interested in having ships in its waters that could endanger the maritime environment.”

New national security threats will, in fact, require NATO to become more agile. It can’t respond to every threat, of course; it’s a military alliance, after all. But with galling violations that cause concrete harm to member states, NATO can intervene—together with novel allies. When it comes to the shadow fleet, doing so would be a good deed for international security and for the environment.

[mariacallous]

It was only a matter of time before Russia’s fast-growing shadow fleet, a group of vessels whose owners do their utmost to conceal their identity while carrying oil to evade sanctions on Moscow, started becoming a serious maritime risk. Russian vessels are now regularly turning down pilotage in Danish waters, the Financial Times reports—a practice that not only breaches maritime etiquette but could also lead to a disastrous accident.

The collision involving a container ship and Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge in the United States on March 26 demonstrates the dangers involved when bulky ships vessels through difficult waters. Indeed, the Dali struck the bridge despite being steered by two pilots. Even if just a small share of vessels turn down pilotage, similar disasters risk becoming commonplace.

International maritime rules strongly recommend the use of pilots with specialized local knowledge for most vessels sailing through Denmark’s Great Belt, the narrow passage between the country’s largest islands. The Great Belt is not just narrow—it also has treacherous waters and is extremely busy: Every year, some 70,000 vessels pass through the Great Belt and the nearby Sound (Oresund), which sits between the shores of Denmark and Sweden.  It’s standard practice to follow international maritime recommendations and take on an experienced local pilot when it comes to difficult navigation routes, whether that’s the Great Belt or the Suez Canal.

The Geography of the Danish Straits

For the sake of maritime order and safety, Copenhagen could block ships that refuse pilotage. That, though, might trigger a standoff with Russia—if Moscow admits its role as a patron of the shadow fleet. Indeed, blocking these rule-breaking vessels would itself violate international maritime rules. Before forcing such a choice, however, the open-source intelligence community could help by revealing the identities and whereabouts of shadow vessels’ owners.

Since the beginning of this year, at least 20 tankers that are suspected to be shadow vessels transporting Russian oil have refused to take Danish pilots on board, according to internal reports leaked to the Financial Times and the Danish research group Danwatch.

That’s at least 20 tankers that have sailed through the Baltic Sea—in most cases via the Gulf of Finland, passing through the exclusive economic zones of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, and Germany—into Danish waters and the Great Belt, from which they have traveled on to Kattegat (comprising Danish and Swedish waters) and Skagerrak (Danish and Norwegian waters) and into the North Sea and the oceans that will bring them to their buyers in countries such as India and China.

Shadow vessels are clapped-out ships that spend their last remaining years providing transportation to and from sanctioned countries that official vessels and their owners won’t touch. The risk that these and other dark vessels pose to coastal states is further increased by the fact that they sail under the flags of countries unlikely to come to anyone’s aid if they cause accidents or incidents (Gabon is a particular favorite) and don’t undergo regular maintenance. Any accident—be it a collision or an oil leak—is likely to be doubly disastrous as a result.

Add to that the fact that their owners are hard to track down—and that they lack proper insurance. If a shadow vessel were to sustain a massive oil spill in, say, Finnish waters, Finnish authorities and taxpayers would end up on the hook. And shadow vessels are more likely than law-abiding ones to be involved in accidents since they frequently turn off their AIS (automatic identification system), a GPS-like navigation tool that allows vessels to see one another.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s attempts—often successful—to avoid sanctions have caused the shadow fleet to balloon; it’s currently thought to encompass some 1,400 vessels, though like all illicit activities, it’s impossible to measure precisely. (My report about the shadow fleet from last December provides an in-depth examination of the ships and the threats posed by them.)

If oil spills do occur, the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds assist the countries affected. But if oil and other toxic spills increase substantially, as they’re likely to do as a result of the shadow fleet, the fund won’t have enough money to compensate everyone.

So should Denmark simply block shadow vessels refusing pilotage, or all shadow vessels for that matter?

Not so fast. Yes, shadow vessels violate international maritime rules and conventions—but the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) gives all vessels the right of so-called innocent passage, meaning the right to sail through other countries’ territorial waters and exclusive economic zones. The fact that shadow vessels violate maritime rules doesn’t give coastal states the right to violate the rules in turn.

And, noted retired Rear Adm. Nils Wang—a former chief of the Danish Navy, which also covers a range of coast guard tasks—“according to international law, the Danish Straits are international straits and are not under Danish jurisdiction. For this reason, too, Denmark doesn’t have the legal right to force ships to use pilots.”

Though most ships follow the IMO’s recommendations and use pilotage, for which they pay a fee, over the years there have been some cheapskates that turned down pilotage.  In some cases, those ships caused oil spills. “Every time there’s a leak from a vessel that didn’t use pilotage, there’s an outcry to ban offenders, but we can’t,” Wang said.

Then, in the mid-2010s, the number of cheapskates traveling without pilotage grew.

Danish authorities got creative and announced that if ships with drafts (the amount that the extends beneath the waterline) of more than 11 meters (about 36 feet) didn’t request pilotage, then the Danish authorities would call them on VHF, the radio used by sailors, and remind them that they weren’t following international recommendations, and that Denmark would report them to their flag state and the IMO.

What’s more, a call on VHF allows every vessel in the vicinity to hear the conversation. “And then we started doing it,” Wang said. “And it changed behavior, because it was embarrassing for the ships and the captains to be called out like this. But if you’re part of the dark fleet, you don’t give a damn. Calling these vessels out won’t make a difference.”

Coastal states do have the right to block access in their territorial waters in certain cases—such as if transiting vessels are in poor repair or lack proper insurance. But when nations agreed and signed UNCLOS in 1982, a situation in which a country systematically evades globalization-based economic sanctions by using a fleet of dark vessels was inconceivable.

In response to the emergency of the shadow fleet, the world’s UNCLOS signatories could convene to make pilotage in sensitive waters mandatory. But such negotiations would take a long time, and under the current geopolitical conditions may never reach a conclusion. And because the Danish Straits are international waters, Denmark can’t impose new rules on its own.

This is globalization in a fiercely geopolitical era: Russia can invade Ukraine and evade the resulting sanctions by means of a fleet that sails through law-abiding countries’ waters—and their governments can’t stop it. On the contrary, with Russia now having joined Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea in using a shadow fleet, more countries will conclude that misbehaving and incurring economic sanctions is no big deal. And trade using dark vessels is cheaper than using legally operating ones.

An even larger shadow fleet would, of course, increase the risks both for marine wildlife and regular shipping. If a Russian shadow vessel collides in the Danish Straits with a legal merchant vessel, or even a Danish Navy vessel, what would Denmark do? What would NATO do?

But for now, there’s one group of dark-fleet operators that can be targeted completely legally and without risk of geopolitical escalation: the shadow vessels’ owners. They are plentiful and hide behind post office box addresses in countries such as the United Arab Emirates—because they don’t want to emerge from the shadows.

On the good side in this standoff, though, we have a large and growing community of open-source investigators, both professionals and amateurs. These investigators should take on a good deed for the global maritime order and investigate shadow-vessel owners, then share their identity and activities. Some may be hardened criminals immune to the embarrassment of public scrutiny, but many others may simply be ordinary businesspeople who have spotted an opportunity.

Just as with the ships once called out on Danish radio, public shame may be one way to force people to act for the better.