Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers is now believed to be over 1,000-strong. The ships are 20-25 years old. Putin has neither the time nor the money to build all the ships he needs.
And he needs a lot because a major slice of Russia’s oil exports are seaborne. International oil sales provide 20 percent of the government’s revenues and the government is spending 40-60 percent of its revenues on the Ukraine War.
The floating rust buckets in the shadow fleet are uninsurable and an environmental disaster waiting to happen. But Putin doesn’t care about their seaworthiness. They are cheap to buy and run and thus make the big profits he needs to feed his war machine.
Stop the Shadow Fleet and you seriously damage the Russian war effort.
Trump has shown the way – possibly. Those are words that have never before appeared in this blog and are unlikely to ever appear again. But as far as dealing with the growing sanctions-busting shadow fleet of oil tankers goes, the US president could be the trend setter.
In recent weeks, Donald Trump has ordered the boarding of seven oil tankers; arrested the crew; sailed the ships to a safe port; impounded the vessels and their cargo and announced plans to sell both.
It was a bold move and the legal framework for Trump’s moves is—to say the least—dicey. The procedure goes something like this—the US tracks a vessel with satellites; monitors its signals; checks to see if it is manipulating its Automatic Identification System (which is illegal); watches to see if it is transferring oil to other ships (also illegal); is uninsured or operating under a false flag (both illegal).
If it is doing anything likely to contravene the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) then it can be deemed a suspect “stateless vessel.” As such it can be boarded. Its cargo, registration papers, insurance documents can be checked along with the ship’s seaworthiness. If it is found wanting in any of the above then it is confirmed as “stateless.” The crew is arrested. The ship sailed to a safe port and the vessel and cargo are impounded.
The Royal Navy would love to follow suit. So would the French and the Scandinavians. The French have already detained one shadow fleet tanker in the Mediterranean (the Grinch) and the Royal Navy participated in the detention of a ship in the North Atlantic (the Marinera).
But it is in the Baltic and the English Channel where the shadow fleet is most vulnerable. A large proportion of the Russia’s tanker-borne oil is loaded at Primorsk or Ust-loga and sails through the Baltic, the Danish Straits and then the North Sea and the English Channel on their way to Asia via the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal.
That first leg is largely British and Scandinavian territorial waters where local navies could easily board the shadow fleet tankers.
It is known that governments are actively investigating ways of doing so. But their actions need to be legally watertight.
One method could be simply following the legal precedent currently being set by the Trump Administration. In the case of the British, they are also examining using the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act (SAMLA). This law is the post-Brexit legislation for creating and enforcing sanctions. It allows the government, among other things, to “seize or detain property involved in sanctions evasion.”
It is reckoned that in 2025 more than 800 shadow fleet tankers passed through the English Channel. They were carefully tracked by radar and satellite. On several occasions Royal Navy patrol boats were dispatched as escorts so that, according Armed Forces Minister, said: “Putin knows that we know exactly what he is doing.”
But so far the government has not used SAMLA or any other legal mechanism to detain any of the shadow fleet tankers. The reason is because for every law there is usually a countervailing law to contradict it. In this case the contradiction is found in UNCLOS and is termed the right of “innocent passage”
UNCLOS became the cornerstone of international maritime law in 1982. Its legal antecedents, however, stretch back to 1609 and Hugo Grotius’s “Freedom of the Seas Doctrine.” Basically, it says that a coastal state must allow foreign ships to pass through its territorial waters as long as they move “continuously and expeditiously” and do not threaten the coastal state’s peace and security.”
There are a few loopholes that could be used against the shadow fleet such as the ship must follow safety rules and cannot turn off or manipulate its Automatic Identification System. But the bottom line is that any country that detains a ship from another country must have a very good reason, because the detention can be deemed an act of war.
* Tom Arms is foreign editor of Liberal Democrat Voice. He also contributes to “The New World” magazine and lectures on world affairs. He is the author of “America Made in Britain,” two editions of “The Encyclopaedia of the Cold War” and “The Falklands Crisis.”
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7 Comments
Interesting read but I have one difficulty with the concept of “sanctions-busting shadow fleet” – this is not about UN approved sanctions that could perhaps be regarded as ‘international law’ but sanctions imposed by a group of countries on another country.
My point is, this smacks of a real circular argument to give the appearance of legality: we impose sanctions on another country, we find a foreign ship in international waters breaking the sanctions we have imposed, we therefore claim legal justification to seize the ship and charge the captain with an offence. In other words, our legal justification is nothing more than the fact we say it is legal, despite the international law explicitly protecting ships passing through international waters.
I wonder how the UK would react if Russia announced sanctions on UK shipping in response to UK actions and then seized some UK ship passing through international waters? No doubt the UK would denounce the action as illegal though it would be no more flouting international law than what we are trying to do with sanctions against the Russian shadow fleet.
I think that seizing these oil tankers, the kidnapping of Modero, the bullying threat to take Greenland, are all signals of something much greater. The $dollar dominance and with it US hegemony is coming to an end. What we are watching in slow motion, is the frantic lashing-out of a dying animal (US economic control).
The sanction and seizure of $500 billion of Russian held money in 2022 was intended to teach Russia a lesson, but it taught the wider world a much bigger lesson.
We are now in a world where missiles matter less than the purchase of US treasury debt. Every time China, Russia, India and Japan offload their US Treasury Bonds, and refuse to buy any more US debt, the $dollar dominance dies a little bit more. Countries that understand this, are avoiding the accumulation of dying fiat $dollars, and instead buying food and industrial commodities and precious metals.
Joan Summers. The only language people like Putin and Trump understand is force. If one of our ships is seized we seized one of theirs.
‘Legality’ ties hands in a situation like we have re Putin’s war. The 1000 ships feeding the war will make it last longer and,maybe, Ukraine falls through being unable to continue the fighting..Since there will be no UN troops in Ukraine till after the war (a ridiculous situation)seizing a ship does seem to be the only option.
This is ridiculous – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not only illegal, but has caused the most appalling suffering to millions of people. If Tom’s report here is correct, then numerous ships from Russia’s shadow fleet are sailing through UK territorial waters, breaking a number of international maritime regulations as they do, in order to further Putin’s war – in the process prolonging all the suffering that war is causing. We are tracking those vessels and have even sent ships out to escort some of them, yet we do nothing to stop them because we’re worrying about legal technicalities???
I’m sure the people who are dying in the battlefields in Ukraine, the prisoners and getting tortured by Russian Government thugs, the civilians living in fear in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine, and all the people whose homes have been destroyed by Russian drones must be delighted to know how seriously we take all these legal niceties.
I mean, the Government does have a huge majority in Parliament. If they are really worried that the law is unclear on how we can stop sanctions busting vessels sailing through our waters, they could – y’know – change the law to clarify the situation.
Might it be that ending/breaking international law law by any coumtry, including ours, seiously harms international law which is such an important mechanism for aiding international peace?
Might we have an article on the current U. S. A. government killing some 100 seafarers in in inrtnatiomal waters instead of judicially inspecting boats accused, witout evidence, of drug smuggling?
The RN would surely like to do something. The RAF helped with the Marinera, It is in the tradition of Nelson to take risks and seize ships. He sailed against American smugglers in the Caribbean.
Whitehall would likely prefer to do nothing. Treasury Brain. Taking risks. The international nature of maritime law. Possible adjudication in an international court. Alienation of oligarch money such as remains in London. Someone at meetings would have figures about the cost of additional patrol hours. Fuel. Staff retention risks. Wear and tear. The fact that HMS Richmond is to retire early, possibly due to actually being in action. Best to discuss the matter again at the next meeting. Like the medium battlefield helicopter or AJAX. The ironclad fiscal rules must be respected.
It would require quite a brave Minister to break the deadlock. That might require a new government.