'Shadow fleet' used to avoid west's sanctions escalates global tensions

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.

- Peter Beaumont

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.

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. Another vessel was apprehended off the coast of Venezuela on Saturday, and a third was being pursued yesterday, though at least one of those boats does not appear to be on the list of vessels under US sanctions.

The US activity follows 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 have 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 Libya, after 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 from Ukraine’s borders.