Executive Summary:
- The French navy seized the sanctioned crude oil tanker Deliver in the Mediterranean on June 23. This marks the latest in an increasingly frequent series of enforcement measures by European countries against Russia’s shadow fleet.
- Boardings have a legitimate legal basis, but Russian officials characterize them as piracy and dispute the existence of a “shadow fleet.” At the same time, Russia is accepting more of these ships onto its registry.
- As sanctions put pressure on traditional “flag of convenience” countries to expel these ships from their registries, more shadow fleet vessels are registering under the Russian flag. This lets these ships avoid interdiction, but exposes Russia to more direct responsibility for the fleet and takes away deniability.
On July 7, the Ukrainian military struck eight ships in Russia’s “shadow fleet” in the Azov Sea. The commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, reported that all eight tankers were identified as part of the shadow fleet (Telegram/@robert_magyar; Meduza, July 7). This is the latest attack by Ukraine against Russia’s shadow fleet—a sanctions-evasion system made up of aging boats with irregular documentation, inadequate insurance, and frequently spoofed locations. Russia, Iran, and Venezuela have all made use of overlapping shadow fleets to bypass sanctions.
Europe and the United States have cracked down on these shadow fleet vessels in the last two years with both sanctions and boardings. On June 23, the French navy seized the crude oil tanker Deliver as it was transiting the Mediterranean from the Russian port of Primorsk (Kyiv Post, June 27). The European Union sanctioned Deliver in February 2025 as a member of the Russian shadow fleet (EUR-Lex, February 24, 2025). Before it was intercepted in the Mediterranean, the vessel avoided the English Channel completely by taking a circuitous path through the North Atlantic. [1] Shadow fleet tankers are increasingly diverting in this way to avoid the increased scrutiny from the United Kingdom and France.
The Russian Embassy in Paris has called the seizure of Deliver “another case of piracy” (очередном факте пиратства, ocherednom fakte piratstva) (TASS, June 25). It is the latest of several boardings of shadow fleet tankers while en-route to or from a Russian port. Earlier in June, U.K. authorities seized the crude oil tanker Smyrtos in the English Channel and arrested its captain (The Moscow Times, June 14). The European Union sanctioned the ship last July and the United Kingdom last October (Defence Intelligence of Ukraine).
The legal justification for seizures such as that of Deliver and Smyrtos lies in Article 110 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which allows the boarding of a ship that is stateless or suspected of flying a false flag (UNCLOS, accessed July 7). Moscow does not recognize the legality of such boardings and consistently casts the idea of a “shadow fleet” as an invention of the West and an excuse to carry out illegal operations. In several scathing remarks, Russian officials have characterized these operations as “robbery” (разбой, razboi) and, repeatedly, “piracy” (пиратство, piratstvo) (RIA Novosti, March 31; Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, June 2).
Seizures are much more resource-intensive than inspections for the state performing them. The planning, implementation, litigation, and detention of a vessel all generate higher costs. These operations are also costly to the shadow fleet. When Smyrtos was boarded in the English Channel on June 14, at least six other tankers immediately changed course to avoid entering the channel, taking a longer route around the British Isles and through the North Atlantic, just as Deliver did (The Insider, June 14). Such a diversion adds hundreds of miles of rough sea to these voyages. Diversions, fines, and other results of increased pressure all cause friction that makes the shadow fleet more complicated, riskier, and more costly to operate. Still, these seizures, while high-profile and flashy, only work as a complement to sanctions to effectively curb the revenue Russia generates.
Changing documentation within the fleet may make interdiction more difficult in the future. In April 2025, the shadow fleet vessel Kiwala, sailing under the flag of Djibouti, was on its way from the Indian port of Sikka to the Russian port of Ust-Luga when Estonian authorities detained it. After two weeks, documentation issues were resolved, and the tanker was released (ERR, April 26, 2025). In October of 2025, France detained the shadow fleet vessel Boracay, sailing under the flag of Benin and transporting 750,000 barrels of crude from Primorsk to India. In addition to documentation issues, it was the suspected launch point for Russian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) violating Danish airspace (ERR, September 30, 2025). It was eventually released and sailed on.
In reality, Kiwala and Boracay were the same ship, both registered under International Maritime Organization (IMO) number 9332810. [2] Name changes and reflagging are characteristic evasion techniques employed by shadow fleet vessels. The ship is currently operating under the name Phoenix and is flying the Russian flag (Russian Maritime Register of Shipping, accessed July 7). Now that the vessel carries genuine Russian registration, it is neither stateless nor flying a false flag, and thus can no longer be boarded with the same legal justification used in the past.
Phoenix is one example of a clear trend in the shadow fleet. Russian registration is becoming more and more common. Between May 2025 and April 2026, the share of shadow fleet crude oil transported by Russian-flagged vessels grew from 3 percent to 23 percent (Kyiv School of Economics, June 8). As pressure from Western sanctions has mounted, fewer “flag of convenience” states are willing to register sanctioned ships. [3] Cameroon removed both Smyrtos and Deliver from its ship registry in May, leaving both ships without legitimate documentation and allowing the United Kingdom and France to intervene. Russia itself is one of the few jurisdictions left that will associate with these vessels.
There are several signals that show Moscow is making a concerted effort to encourage reflagging. At the 2026 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia will develop the capacity of its domestic merchant fleet, with the goal of becoming one of the largest in the world (Interfax, June 5). In May, a draft of a government decree circulated that would allow foreign companies to register in Russia, along with other changes that would make registering under the Russian flag more appealing (Kommersant, May 22). In June, the Russian Ministry of Transport proposed a draft presidential decree that would make registering ships under the Russian flag quicker and simpler (Interfax, June 11). These signals indicate a deliberate structural shift in how Moscow is thinking about these ships. The shadow fleet could become less a covert evasion system and more a parallel shipping ecosystem operating openly.
If this pattern of reflagging continues, it will make acting against the shadow fleet while avoiding direct confrontation with Russia far more difficult. When Smyrtos was seized in the English Channel and other shadow fleet tankers diverted into the North Atlantic, the Russian-flagged shadow fleet tanker Forwarder transited the channel unimpeded, though reportedly with a U.K. patrol vessel escort (The Insider, June 18). Russian-flagged tankers have legitimate documentation under a jurisdiction that cannot be pressured to deregister them and do not need to guard against boardings and seizures justified by Article 110.
Since 2024, there have been several instances of the Russian military providing support to the shadow fleet—another indicator that Russia is increasingly comfortable associating directly with these vessels. The Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich is, at the moment, most infamous on this count. Admiral Grigorovich escorted two sanctioned tankers in the spring and had been loitering in the English Channel when it brought international attention by firing warning shots near a private yacht. Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary to the Kremlin, has stated that Russia is justified in escorting merchant ships to protect its interests and guard against piracy (RIA Novosti, April 9). The increasing militarization of shipping by Russia legitimizes the Ukrainian argument that shadow fleet vessels should be treated as military targets (The Kyiv Independent, July 1).
By reflagging shadow fleet vessels to the Russian registry, Moscow can close the legal opening that made Deliver and Smyrtos boardable. It loses plausible deniability, however, and assumes responsibility for a fleet of aging, often poorly maintained tankers with no access to robust insurance. The pattern of reflagging and providing military escort takes much of the “shadow” out of the fleet’s operations, expends more of Russia’s resources to run it, and exposes both military and merchant ships to a higher risk of Ukrainian drone attacks. Encumbered by Western sanctions and interdictions, the fleet is at a critical point where it is evolving to sustain the revenue that is critical to Russian interests.
Notes:
[1] AIS data retrieved via Global Fishing Watch. Accessed June 29, 2026.
[2] Ship names can and will be changed easily in the shadow fleet. IMO numbers like the one above act as a sort of serial number for a merchant ship and are very difficult to tamper with. Therefore, it is preferable to identify a ship by its IMO number.
[3] Ships must be registered to a single country’s ship registry, but it does not have to be the country in which the ship owner is located. Therefore, it is quite common practice to register a merchant ship in a jurisdiction with laxer regulations, lower taxes, and minimal registration fees. The registries of these jurisdictions—such as Panama, Liberia, Marshall Islands, and Cameroon, among others—are called flags of convenience.
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