Alarm over ‘exploding’ rise in use of sanctions-busting shadow fleet

The “shadow fleet” used by Russia, Iran and Venezuela to avoid western sanctions and ship cargo to customers including China and India is “exploding” in its scale and scope, and there are concerns that efforts to counter it are drawing closer to dangerous military confrontations. Ukraine launches drone attack on Russian oil tanker in Mediterranean – video The vessel Boracay, off the coast of Saint-Nazaire in France.Photograph: Stéphane Mahé/Reuters Complicating the issue is that Russia has begun putting its own flag on some former shadow fleet tankers, in an open challenge to Europe . The constellation of ageing oil tankers - under opaque ownership and questionable flagging - has become the focus of rising international attention this year. There have been maritime interdictions to enforce sanctions, and the recently announced US blockade of sanctions-busting ships in Venezuela . Earlier this month US special forces rappelled from helicopters to board the Skipper , a tanker off Venezuela that the US treasury had placed under sanctions in 2022 amid allegations it had been smuggling oil on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah. Loop of US special forces boarding a tanker off Venezuela Map of tankers around Venezuela On Saturday US forces apprehended a second merchant vessel carrying oil off the coast of Venezuela in international waters, even though it does not appear to be on the list of vessels under US sanctions. The US seizures follow incidents this year where Estonia and France interdicted vessels suspected of belonging to Russia’s shadow fleet , and recent attacks by Ukrainian air and sea drones on Russian shadow tankers accused of being involved in sanctions evasion. The increasingly aggressive efforts to police the shadow fleet and evidence that Russia is willing to use military assets to protect tankers, has led experts to warn of the risk of confrontation. That was dramatically underlined on Friday when Ukraine announced it had struck a Russian tanker with aerial drones in neutral waters off the coast of Libya, after previous similar attacks in the Black Sea. A source in the Security Service of Ukraine said it was a “new, unprecedented special operation”, Kyiv’s first attack on a Russian tanker in the Mediterranean, carried out 1,200 miles (2,000km) from Ukraine’s borders. Map showing Ukrainian attacks on tankers in the Black Sea “ The shadow fleet itself is not a new threat,” said Gonzalo Saiz Erausquin, a research fellow at the finance and security centre at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank. “But [it] has expanded drastically after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That saw what we call the shadow fleet explode to some 900-1,200 vessels globally. “It is not highly structured or homogeneous. These are vessels that Russian interests are able to purchase secondhand, opaquely owned tankers or owned by companies prepared to engage in illicit activity.” The shadow fleet has spawned a whole illicit network to support it, including a recent proliferation of fake flag registration websites, unscrupulous brokers and a cast of opaque companies that...

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