The news footage was satisfyingly reminiscent of Mission: Impossible. Masked French commandoes swarmed up the side of the rusty oil tanker Boracay, assault rifles drawn, and commenced their search for evidence the vessel had been responsible for launching Russian drones at Danish airports. The captain and first officer – both Chinese nationals – were taken into custody. France’s president Emmanuel Macron could not confirm that the Boracay was responsible for the drone attacks – but did make it clear that stopping the vessel off the coast of St Nazaire was intended as ‘a step moving towards a policy of obstruction of suspicious ships in our waters that are involved in trafficking’ Russian oil. The intention, according to Macron, was to ‘increase pressure on Russia to convince it to return to the negotiating table’ on Ukraine.
Shadow fleet tankers may be on the dodgy end of the spectrum of seafaring respectability. But they are not, as Macron suggests, maritime outlaws
Two days later, after the delegates at the European summit in Copenhagen where Macron spoke his stirring words had gone home, the Boracay quietly resumed its voyage. The vessel’s captain was charged with nothing more menacing than disobeying orders to halt by the French Navy. No evidence was found of involvement with the drones that supposedly buzzed Copenhagen airport on September 30th. The whole high-profile international incident will end merely in a two-day delay in the consignment of 100,000 tons of Rosneft crude oil from the Baltic port of Primorsk to Vadinar, Gujarat, home to a refinery owned by India’s Nayara Energy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the tanker’s detention as an ‘act of piracy’ and alleged that Macron had initiated the move for domestic policy reasons. ‘There is no other way to deflect attention of the population, citizens of France, from difficult internal problems that are hard to solve,’ Putin said at a forum of foreign policy experts in Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi.
For once, Putin may have a point. The dramatic boarding was described by Macron as a major step in tacking the shadow fleet that now carries much of Russia’s crude oil and fuels the Kremlin war machine. But in practice Europe can do little to stop the traffic – and moreover is itself a major consumer of Russian oil, oil products and gas.
Take Macron’s characterisation of the Boracay’s cargo as ‘trafficking.’ Buying and selling Russian oil is not banned. Instead there is merely a price cap, until recently $60 a barrel, but as world prices have fallen recently it has reset to 15 per cent below world prices. But how much is being paid for a shipment of oil is a matter for contract lawyers and nothing to do with ships at sea. Indeed the price cap has proved childishly easy to avoid. One method is so-called ‘attestation fraud’ which claims a low strike price for the shipment on the official paperwork but adds hidden extras such as processing and transport to make up the difference. Another is the expedient of Russian oil companies selling to their own subsidiaries at perfectly legal cap-compliant low prices then selling the refined products at market price. Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil company, still operates refineries in the Netherlands, Romania and Bulgaria that are perfectly sanctions compliant.
As for the so-called ‘shadow fleet’, what this nefarious-sounding term actually means is oil tankers that are flagged in low-regulation jurisdictions and not insured in London but instead carry policies underwritten by Russian, Indian or Chinese insurers. The Boracay is a poster child for this kind of vessel. Built in 2007, she is currently registered in Benin. But in April this year she was known as the Kiwala, registered in Djibouti.
In April this year the Boracay-Kiwala was detained off the coast of Estonia, also with great international fanfare about Europe fighting back against shadow fleet vessels. Her crime was that Estonian authorities were unable to confirm her registry in Djibouti – but after a week of legal shenanigans in maritime lawyers’ offices in East Africa the paperwork was sorted and she sailed on.
In short, shadow fleet tankers may be on the dodgy end of the spectrum of seafaring respectability. But they are not, as Macron suggests, maritime outlaws. Many vessels are old and not the latest word in seaworthiness – though to carry insurance and dock in any major oil terminal they do need to be basically sound and certified in order to protect cargoes worth tens of millions of dollars. Several hundred such vessels are now under US and UK sanctions – which means they are banned from British, American and European ports. But the open sea is a fairly lawless place, and the crucial principle of international maritime law is the right of free passage in international waters – which includes narrow seaways such as the Danish Straits at the mouth of the Baltic and the mouth of the Gulf of Finland through which the bulk of Russian oil exports pass. Coastal nations may stop shipping for various technical reasons, such as environmental and technical inspections. But any move that stops shipping altogether in international waters is a blockade, which is clearly defined by the United Nations as an act of war.
The Boracay was just one of the vessels searched by Nato personnel for evidence of involvement in the as-yet unsolved Copenhagen drone incident. Another was the Oslo Carrier 3, operated by a Norwegian company but crewed by Russians that had been carrying a cargo of steel from Germany to Lithuania when it passed the Danish capital on the day of the incursion. Nothing was found on board her, either. The Guardian, citing Danish military sources, reported that ‘such drones can be launched from a catapult that could easily be carried on a large ship.’ Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that Europe faced a ‘hybrid war’ and that ‘there is only one country that is willing to threaten us, and it is Russia.’ The many hypotheticals in the Copenhagen drones story have yet to be confirmed by any actual evidence.
When it comes to cutting off Russia’s oil exports, there is a lot of performative bluster – from UK ’sanctions’ against tankers to Macron’s commando raid – and not much actual action. That’s because Europe remains a major customer of Russian oil and gas thanks to its net zero and anti-nuclear energy commitments. Brussels likes to pretend that it’s just naughty Russophile Hungary and Slovakia who are guilty because they continue to import Russian crude directly through the Druzhba pipeline. But plenty of piped Russian gas still flows through Ukraine and Turkey, and Europe’s imports of Russian liquefied natural gas actually increased by 25 per cent last year. Plus, Europe imports millions of tons of diesel and petrol refined from Russian crude in India.
Commando raids make for great TV. But they’re just a distraction from the real issue, which is that European energy consumers remain among the biggest funders of Putin’s war machine.
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