A Three-Step Plan for Stopping Putin’s ‘Shadow’ Oil Tankers

The US and its European allies have the experience and training to board and seize ships smuggling Russian oil.

By Retired Admiral James Stavridis, Fletcher Dean Emeritus, and former supreme allied commander of NATO

Sanctions imposed on Russia after its illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine were never going to put a quick end to President Vladimir Putin’s war. Economic punishments are always leaky and take years to have full impact — witness the decades that South Africa spent under international economic restrictions because of apartheid.

But by enacting sanctions at the heart of Russia’s economy — its oil and gas sector — the West hoped to achieve a relatively rapid and devastating effect, crushing Putin’s ability to raise the cash needed for his war machine. As Senator John McCain put it a decade ago, Russia is “a gas station masquerading as a country.”

Unfortunately, Moscow has responded nimbly to the challenges of exporting hydrocarbons, particularly oil. It is using a “shadow fleet” of hundreds of tankers to move oil to China, India and nations in the Global South willing to ignore Western sanctions. According to recent reporting by Bloomberg, this activity is getting even more prevalent.

The US, UK and European Union have placed sanctions on more than 70 individual tankers. These are big, commercial ships that have been blacklisted by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control or equivalent agencies in the UK and EU. Yet it appears at least a third of them are carrying oil to willing buyers.

How can this shadow fleet be stopped?

Let’s begin by acknowledging the difficulty in enforcement. The sea is vast and at any given moment tens of thousands of commercial ships are plying the oceans. Vessels are required to have global tracking devices, known as an automatic identification system (AIS), which are monitored by a global network called vessel traffic services (VTS). It’s similar to air-traffic control at airports.

But captains smuggling Russian oil or other sanctioned goods can simply turn off their transponders. Once a commercial vessel has “gone dark” by disconnecting from VTS, a warship has real challenges identifying, hailing, stopping and inspecting it.

I have faced these challenges many times at sea. Decades ago, on missions involving arms embargoes against Haiti and Serbia, I commanded destroyers charged with enforcing sanctions. Doing so requires the highest-level intelligence capabilities for locating the targets and attempting to pull them over, like a traffic stop on a highway. Lumbering cargo vessels and tankers certainly can’t outrun a warship, but they can pretend not to hear your radio calls, maneuver in dangerous ways, and continue on at their top speed.

A warship captain is then faced with a tricky choice. Do you “shoulder” the commercial ship, actually laying your billion-dollar destroyer alongside a miscreant commercial tanker and risking a collision? Should you send warning shots across its bow? Fire at its rudders with your .50 caliber machine guns? What if you kill civilian mariners in the process?

I remember, during the arms embargo off the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, being told by an aggressive British commodore to “simply lay your ship alongside theirs and they will certainly stop.” Right, I thought, my brand-new Arleigh Burke-class AEGIS destroyer smashing into some beat-up cargo ship to stop pallets of machine-gun bullets from getting to Serbia. It didn’t seem like a particularly good trade, and fortunately it never came to that point.

Stopping smuggling is hard work and outcomes will be uncertain. But that doesn’t mean Western nations should forget trying to enforce the sanctions against Russia.

Three distinct lines of effort are called for. The first is increased intelligence attention to understand the shipping processes Russia is using from embarkation to arrival. We need a stronger coalition effort to create a refined target list of the ships that comprise the shadow fleet. Already, artificial intelligence is showing promise on this front through assessing satellite images.

The next step is name, shame and fine. The nations providing the flags of convenience — such as Barbados, which according to recent reporting has more than a dozen flagged ships engaged in the trade — should be threatened with secondary sanctions. (“Flags of convenience” is the shady practice of shipping companies paying to register a ship in a nation other than that in which they are actually located.) The fines could be imposed through the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization or directly levied by the US, UK and EU.

Third, and most controversially, Western militaries should consider boarding, seizing and impounding vessels engaged in this trade. This was done successfully during the Balkan wars. And the US, UK and EU-nation navies have great skill in search and seizure, honed a decade ago in counter-piracy operations off West Africa (a mission I led as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s supreme commander). Maritime special forces — US Navy SEALS, the Royal Navy’s Special Boat Service and the like — could carry out the missions overtly or clandestinely.

Once confiscated, the vessels would be impounded in Western ports and held until their cases could be adjudicated by courts. This could occur either in the legal system of the nation that seized the ship or perhaps by an international body under the auspices of the UN. While this approach will undoubtedly lead to legal challenges by Russia and other nations, if the West gathers solid intelligence on the smuggling of sanctioned oil or gas it should be possible to impound and sell the vessels and their cargo. Ideally, proceeds could be turned over to Ukraine’s war effort.

I’m all for freedom of the high seas and international trade, but not if ships are violating the legal and sensible sanctions imposed to put pressure on Putin’s brutal regime. We must catch up with the shadow fleet.

(This post is republished from Bloomberg.)