Russia’s shadow fleet: a growing threat

Russia’s shadow tankers use AIS blackouts or spoofing to hide entry into Russian ports or ship to ship transfers at sea, where oil is moved sometimes multiple times between vessels and may be blended with oil from other countries to obscure its origin. To conceal their activities further, the shadow fleet uses flags of convenience from countries that are less likely to enforce Western sanctions and have complex ownership and management structures to hide links to Russia. ‘The challenge with the shadow fleet is that ownership is very opaque’, says Gonzalo Saiz Erausquin, who is part of a maritime sanctions taskforce at national security think tank Royal United Services Institute. ‘Another issue is flag hopping, if a vessel is spotted to be flagged to one jurisdiction, it will just register with another to camouflage its operations’.