A price cap for Russian oil transports at sea has been in effect since December 5. The EU and the US want to prevent Vladimir Putin from receiving new money for his attack on Ukraine. The Russian President wants to circumvent the sanctions with a secret tanker fleet.
At the beginning of March, an embargo for Russian oil in Europe was discussed for the first time. Nine months later, it comes into force together with an oil price cap: At the beginning of December, the EU, the G7 and Australia stipulated that a barrel of Russian Urals oil may only be transported by sea if it costs less than 60 US dollars costs.
It should be the standing K.o. for the Russian oil business, because most tankers in the world fly the Greek, Maltese or Cypriot flag. If Moscow wants to continue selling its oil to the world, it can only do so according to Western price specifications and with capped revenues that are not sufficient to fill the war chest - that was the hope.
However, the closer the price limit came, the more frequently one read about a Russian tanker fleet. Russia is said to have quietly bought more than 100 aging tankers for a secret shadow fleet in recent months. Old ships from Iran or Venezuela that should actually be scrapped, had reported the "Financial Times". Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to use them to circumvent the oil price cap.
A lucrative plan, because the income, especially from the oil business, is enormous. Since the beginning of the war alone, fossil fuels have added nearly 250 billion euros to Russia's war chest, according to an overview compiled by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA). Oil products account for two-thirds of the total.
However, sales have recently been falling, not only in Europe, but also with the new major Russian customers China and India: From April to the end of November, the People's Republic transferred around 200 million euros a day to Russia for fossil fuels. Since the beginning of December, the total has shrunk by a good half.
Indian purchases have also recently halved: instead of a good 100 million euros, the subcontinent is currently only buying oil from Russia for around 50 million euros a day. As the "Financial Times" found out, even after December 5 in at least seven cases involving tankers insured in Europe. Because not only the large tanker fleets, but also the most important shipping insurers are in European hands. Moscow has therefore accepted the price cap in several cases, even though Russian President Putin had announced that he would not do business at this price.
There is some evidence that the oil price ceiling is working. But the evidence can also be misleading, because the shadow fleet does not bear its name for nothing: it operates in the background, conceals its data, presumably does not take out insurance and can therefore not be identified and localized as easily in international maritime traffic as with the associated payment flows.
The British "Guardian" reports that tankers with connections to Russia in the South Atlantic have been turning off their tracking systems more and more for some time. The "Financial Times" has also found at least one ship that works with incorrect position data.
Both reports indicate that shadow tankers on the high seas plan to meet up with other tankers with no connections to Russia to tranship the loaded Urals. After that, it takes a lot of effort to determine whether the supposedly "clean" tankers in the port of destination have loaded sanctioned Russian oil or not. Russia has learned from Iran and North Korea how to circumvent oil sanctions, the Guardian quotes Windward, a shipping consultancy, in its report.
According to Windward, it uncovered a handover in the Atlantic Ocean off the African coast: the process was unmasked when a tanker was registered in the Seychelles in June - the island state in the Indian Ocean is valued for its secrecy, according to various shipping portals. It was also noticeable that the tanker is said to have suddenly spent six days in exactly the same place off the coast of Angola in the South Atlantic in mid-October. But that would be very unusual for a tanker, according to Windward.
Wherever he actually was during this time: Presumably the handover of the Russian oil took place during this time. Because when the tanker moved again after six days, it drove to a port in Malaysia. And as Windward claims after an evaluation, he suddenly had more draft there than at the last stop on land, although he was not officially loaded in the meantime.
However, shipping experts would not overestimate this alleged success of the Russian shadow fleet. Because even a busy and successful accumulation of more than 100 tankers is not enough to replace all 2022 Russian oil exports at sea, they explain. That would presumably require 240 tankers, the Financial Times quotes an industry analyst as saying. Russia first has to save so many tankers from being scrapped.
