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For most Europeans, it was just another quiet weekend, but out in the Atlantic, a high-stakes naval standoff was playing out. In response of the interception, French President Emmanuel Macron declared it completely unacceptable for ships to bypass international sanctions and fund Russia’s ongoing war.
Russia’s infamous shadow fleet is a clandestine armada of tankers that Moscow has deployed to bypass international sanctions on oil sales, most notably the G7 price cap. The Kremlin has spent billions to buy dilapidated ships of murky ownership that fall short of the premium insurance and therefore evade Western oversight.
However, insurance is just one of the ways that the shadow fleet uses to avoid global tracking. These ghost vessels manipulate their registration, switch flags to jump from one jurisdiction, transmit falsified GPS data, turn off their transponders to become invisible at sea.
Finally, they rely on the oldest trick in the book: moving their oil cargo between ships to mask its true origin before it ever reaches port.
The EU, through successive packages of sanctions, has blacklisted over 600 of these shadow vessels, but the years-long crackdown has turned into a frustrating game of whack-a-mole.
The moment one ship is designated, another emerges from the dark. However, for Europeans, this is not just a financial game of cat and mouse.
These vessels are in extremely poor condition, making them an environmental ticking clock for a catastrophic oil spill on European shores. Also, a tanker thought to be part of the fleet, has been caught in the Baltic Sea dragging its anchor to damage critical undersea cables.
Ultimately, global maritime laws were written to protect free trade under the premise of innocent passage. However, there’s nothing innocent in how Russia uses these rules as a shield to fund its war machine.
Additional reporting by Jorge Liboreiro.
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