The new systemic sanctions against the Russian ocean-going tanker fleet, introduced on February 24, 2025, increase the urgency of identifying violations of international maritime law by such vessels, the risks that their operation poses to maritime safety and the marine environment, and the possible provocations where these tankers are being prepared as tools.
As an example, we can cite a group of large-tonnage tankers operated by the Russian sanctioned beneficiary “Sovcomflot”, more than 80% of whose shares belong to the Russian state, such as the “Liteyny Prospect”, IMO number 9256078, “Sakhalin”, IMO number 9249128, “Ladoga”, IMO number 9339313, and “Zaliv Baikal”, IMO number 9360128.
All of these vessels have carried out large-scale transportation of Russian oil products in recent years to support the financing of aggression against Ukraine, in particular from ports in the Far East; “Liteyny Prospect” was also seen in the Baltic Sea, and Ladoga in the Black Sea.
“Sovcomflot” operated these vessels, changing their flags, through a number of companies, such as the sanctioned “South Fleet Ltd” and “Invest Fleet Ltd”, registered in St. Petersburg, but as of 2025, these tankers, except for “Zaliv Baikal”, operated through “Starfish Ship Management” from the UAE and supervised by the “Indian Register of Shipping”, “migrated” to the Russian flag and are, as of the end of February 2025, in Far Eastern Russian ports.
At the same time, “Invest Fleet” is a classic liner, with an “insane” authorized capital of 10 thousand rubles. The occupiers’ registers hide the managers of this structure, but through its electronic contacts one can see the role of Gennady Semenov, also affiliated with another structure of “Sovcomflot”, namely the Novorossiysk Novoshipinvest, and the management of this laying by the sanctioned SKF “Arktika”. A similar situation is observed with the “Southern Fleet” structure.
At the same time, the “Liteyny Prospect”, “Sakhalin” and “Ladoga” are used by the aggressor under the cover of technical documents about supposedly “maritime safety” from the “Russian Maritime Register of Shipping”, and at the same time the tankers “Liteyny Prospect”, “Ladoga” and “Zaliv Baikal” use insurance documents from the Moscow “Ingosstrakh”.
Let us recall, that the aforementioned “maritime register” of the aggressor has been actively used by the occupiers since 2014 to establish their own illegal “standards” in the occupied territories of Ukraine, and since 2022 this Russia’s federal structure has been excluded from the International Association of Classification Societies.
Among the numerous joint scams of “Ingosstrakh” and the “Russian Maritime Register of Shipping”, aimed at laundering huge funds by simulating accidents and, accordingly, the destruction of insured vessels in the World Ocean, it is worth mentioning the case of the fishing seiner “Ivan Golubets”, which sank under the flag of Georgia in July 2019 after a fire in the engine room in the exclusive economic zone of Mauritania in the Atlantic Ocean.
As the then rather technical investigation of the Georgian Maritime Administration and the Mauritanian authorities showed, the fire on the seiner began literally a few hours after the insurance policy from “Ingosstrakh” came into effect, and the vessel itself did not meet any technical requirements, despite the documents from the “Russian Maritime Register” available on it, including fire certificates.
At the same time, the obvious perpetrators of this scam, which also led to human casualties, were the members of the seiner’s crew, both Russians and citizens from the occupied Crimea, who were then urgently “evacuated” from Nouakchott by Russian “diplomats”.
Our attention to this five-year-old story is not accidental. After all, today, when the heavy-duty Russian tankers described above are being transferred to the aggressor’s flag, and have obvious limitations in their own commercial operation at the global level, and at the same time obviously have huge problems with their technical condition, nothing will prevent the scammers from “Sovcomflot” from carrying out a similar scam, with the destruction of the tanker supposedly due to a “technical incident” and the subsequent laundering of insurance funds.
At the same time, the semi-fakeness of the formal shipowners of the described tankers, such as the “Southern Fleet”, “Invest Fleet”, and the like, will clearly contribute to attempts to evade responsibility by both the owners of the oil products and “Sovtransflot”.
An example of this is the current tragicomic “trials” in Russian jurisdiction to “bring to justice” individuals for the environmental disaster on the Black Sea who will knowingly not be able to compensate for billions in damages, which is accompanied by the fact that, as it “suddenly turned out”, the declared insurance funds will not cover the environmental damage.
And therefore, the issue of large-scale disasters and accidents involving the Russian tanker fleet, with the aim of laundering insurance funds, is only a matter of time.
Therefore, additional sanction practices against not only “Sovtransflot”, Russian shipping registers and “Ingosstrakh”, and against tanker fleet vessels controlled by the aggressor, including the aforementioned ones, are worth noting, but also against counterparties associated with these structures, in particular in third jurisdictions, through which large-scale money laundering of the aggressor takes place, and in the future the provocations described above may be carried out.
