Ukraine has identified 238 tankers it said belong to a shadow fleet of ships that Russia is using to keep its oil and fuels moving around the world, with hopes this information (which the west has had for years) will force western authorities to sanction the carriers.
Ukraine has identified this shadow fleet as having a total deadweight of over 100 million tons, approximately 17% of the world’s oil tanker fleet. It has included a number of vessels that it says have been switched from the “Iranian ghost armada” to carry Russian oil.
The Military Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine said the list, published on its website, details an armada built up by Russia at a cost of about $10 billion. That “consists of over a thousand mostly outdated, poorly maintained vessels without proper insurance, with ‘confused’ ownership and management structures, located in ‘friendly’ jurisdictions, under ‘convenient’ flags,” it said.
“We work on sanctions against the Russian shadow fleet,” Ukrainian President Zelenskiy said. “This should be supported at the level of the entire European Union. It is the tanker fleet that provides Putin with the largest part of the income for the war against Ukraine.”
The issue is that it won't be supported - not now, not back in 2022, when Europe had every opportunity to permanently block Russian oil exports - for the simple reason that the west has zero interest in actual sanctions as these would send oil prices sharply higher. Instead what the west wants is to pretend it is sanctioning Russia to virtue signal to the population, meanwhile the population pretends to care and applaud every toothless action from its elected (and unelected) rulers.
It’s hard to gauge if the list would have any influence on western sanctioning authorities, who’ve already targeted large numbers of shadow fleet tankers with zero effect for the reasons noted above. The outgoing Biden administration is mulling a widening of measures against Russia’s shadow fleet and possibly even targeting some of the nation’s oil exports, Bloomberg reported this week. Expect zero impact on actual oil exports.
