Western governments are ramping up sanctions to throttle the Kremlin’s oil trade. But can they prevent ecological disaster?
Russian-linked vessels are dumping oil near Europe’s shores even after being targeted by sanctions, exposing the limits of Western efforts to rein in Moscow’s ‘shadow fleet’.
In November 2024 SourceMaterial revealed how tankers carrying sanctioned Russian oil have caused pollution incidents across the globe. Since then, the EU and UK have each added more than 400 individual ships to their sanctions lists. But slicks keep appearing.
Five tankers in Russia’s sanctions-dodging armada have continued sailing unimpeded through European waters despite being linked with oil slicks in the region, according to SourceMaterial’s analysis of satellite data from SkyTruth, a non-profit group. At least two of them left slicks near Europe’s shores after coming under UK sanctions.
“What we’re seeing now are vessels that are untouchable for the international community,” said Gonzalo Saiz, a sanctions expert at the Royal United Services Institute.
Since G7 allies imposed a price cap on its oil sales in 2022, Moscow has increasingly relied on a fleet of around 1,600 creaky tankers with opaque ownership and patchy insurance to export its crude. Experts say their decrepit state makes them accident-prone, and after SourceMaterial revealed widespread dumping by shadow fleet ships last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that they pose a global environmental threat.
But while the West has sanctioned many and banned them from its ports, the ships still have freedom of navigation under international law. That makes it difficult and costly for coastal states to detain them and shows the difficulty of translating sanctions into effective enforcement, Saiz said.
Biscay slick
On 15 November 2024, a 12 kilometre spill appeared in the wake of the tanker Dinasty in Spanish waters in the Bay of Biscay as it sailed from India’s Jamnagar refinery to the Russian port of Primorsk. The vessel was already under UK sanctions and the EU blacklisted it in May. The ship later re-entered the Mediterranean and earlier this month passed through EU waters off Cyprus.
In July, the Utaki, also already sanctioned by the UK, apparently left a five-kilometre slick in the Mediterranean north of Libya, with the EU outlawing it soon after.
Dinasty’s owner and manager—Libra Shipping and Dreamer Shipmanagement—didn’t reply to a request for comment, nor did the vessel’s current and former flag states.
The incidents have raised doubts that sanctions alone are enough to protect Europe’s coastlines from ecological disaster.
“What we’re seeing now are vessels that are untouchable”
Around a fifth of blacklisted ships continue to transport Russian oil. A large oil spill by one of them could cost up to €1.4 billion to clean up, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air think tank has estimated—leaving taxpayers to foot the bill if the offending boat’s owners cannot be tracked down.
The EU should follow the US by adding other tactics to make sanctions fully effective, said Saiz of RUSI. These could include measures against importers of Russian oil, refineries and port authorities that continue to allow the entry of sanctioned tankers, and the captains of offending ships.
“There’s an opportunity to target facilitators to a greater degree,” he said. “The US has been much more aggressive in targeting those importing Iranian oil.”
An EU spokeswoman said that sanctions were only one of a series of measures against Russia’s oil trade.
“This oil price cap on Russia is a vital measure to disrupt the funding for Moscow’s war machine,” she said. “The production capacity in Russia is also severely impeded with a number of restrictions and prohibitions applied on Russian oil companies and on exports and servicing of oil extraction equipment.”
The EU is preparing a new round of sanctions to take the total number of blacklisted vessels to 560, and also targets shipowners, ports, and refineries, she said. She added that while some sanctioned vessels continue to pass through European waters, the fact that they are monitored makes the vessels less attractive on the international market.
“Targeting vessels increases the cost for Russia to use such vessels as they are no longer able to operate business-as-usual,” she said.
Harsh reality
Enforcement, though, remains in the hands of individual EU states. So far, they haven’t acted systematically. In April, Estonia detained a suspected Russian shadow fleet tanker. On 1 October, French soldiers boarded a vessel after suspecting it of being used to bypass EU sanctions.
After the incident, French President Emmanuel Macron said European military chiefs and NATO would develop new “joint actions in the coming weeks” to “impede suspicious ships” in its waters.
Russia will continue to find creative ways to circumvent sanctions as long as they are in place, meaning environmental risk is likely to remain as long as the conflict continues, said Cormac Mc Garry, a shipping expert at Control Risks.
“The sanctions themselves don’t do anything to stop the shadow fleet—they are the cause of the shadow fleet,” he said. “The harsh reality is, if the West wants the shadow fleet to rejoin the traditional fleet, they would have to rescind sanctions.”
Headline picture: Dariusz Kuzminski/Alamy
