On May 28, our Association’s experts Borys Babin, Andrii Chvaliuk, and Eduard Pleshko joined the webinar “Russia’s Shadow Fleet: Sanctions Evasion Meets Hybrid Warfare,” organized by Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), a non-profit organization registered in the U.S. that specializes in the real-time collection, analysis, and mapping of data on violence and protests around the world.
During the webinar, ACLED’s experts Andrea Carboni and Witold Stupnicki, as well as Mathieu Boulègue from the U.S. Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), discussed two new reports published, “Russia’s Shadow Fleet Presents a Sustained Hybrid War Threat at Sea” and “War Without End: Deterring Russia’s Shadow War”.
Webinar’s rapporteurs stressed, that Russia’s shadow fleet, as a network of over 1,000 aged tankers moving sanctioned oil through the world’s busiest shipping lanes, is no longer just a compliance problem.
It has become an active hybrid warfare platform, implicated in undersea cable sabotage, reconnaissance drone launches over military bases and airports, and an escalating cat-and-mouse game with European states in the Baltic and North Sea.
During the webinar, Professor Babin initiated a discussion regarding the issues of illegal activities, classification societies, and P&I clubs supporting the Russian shadow oil fleet, such as the “Russian Maritime Register of Shipping” and the “Russian Classification Society,” as well as other certification structures supporting Russian oil infrastructure, such as “TÜV Austria.”
Regarding the issues mentioned, including aspects of Russia-controlled shipping in waters adjacent to occupied Crimea, Mathieu Boulègue called for coordination and multilateral cooperation to counter relevant illegal activities, but he recognized the duty to concentrate Western democracies’ political will to make the next effective steps in the relevant dimension.
Other expert stressed on such examples of the new sanctions’ erosion, as the current illicit activities of the U.K. “MarTrust Corporation Ltd,” a key global corporation that organizes payroll and vendor payments for maritime, as this largest specialist payments provider in the shipping industry restarted in mid-May payments transactions to Russian financial institutions, stopped in 2022.
