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.
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.
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.
This seems easy to de-risk. Ukriane could develop a simply Zodiac boat with an Exocet anti-ship missile launcher on it. Whenever the USA finds a Russian shadow fleet ship with its vast global surveillance assets, the Ukrainians get a txt message of the ships location and a free ride right outside of range of the Russian ship. The Zodiac, crewed exclusively by Ukrainians, take the boat into range, fire the missile, and sink the Russian vessel.
Russia invaded Ukraine and has killed thousands of its citizens and is occupying it land since 2014. Any actions of Ukraine against any Russian assets anywhere in the world are fair game for retaliation.