Until US President Donald Trump reversed the thrust of his sanctions policy of Russian oil on Friday, Ukraine’s Western allies had been ramping up the use of international law. Countries sanctioning Russian oil have for the first time enforced boarding and inspection rights under the Law of the Sea this year, experts told Al Jazeera. Some Russian officials believe worse is to come.
London and Brussels are drawing up plans to blockade the Baltic Sea and the straits leading into it. Other key shipping routes are also under threat,” Russian Maritime Board chairman Nikolai Patrushev told officials during a visit to China on October 12. Western sanctions not only ban Russian oil purchases in the sanctioning territories.
They forbid Western-insured tankers from selling Russian oil to third parties except at below-market prices, which leaves Russia with little or no profit. Since sanctions were imposed in 2022, Russia has been exporting about half of its crude oil through a “shadow fleet” of tankers that are not owned or insured by Western institutions, and often do not comply with environmental and safety standards. It is the right to enforce these standards that allows the United States, United Kingdom and European Union to step up compliance inspections using Article 110 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which allows coastal states to inspect vessels.
That has decreased Russia’s room for manoeuvre in its cat-and-mouse game of circumventing oil sanctions 45 months after the EU, US and other Group of Seven (G7) states imposed them. Under UNCLOS, she said, “Instead of just hailing them, ‘Hey, what’s your flag? What’s your insurance?’ and then letting them merrily go on their way under the right of innocent passage … they now had a legal basis to board them.” Shadow tankers have engaged in various illegal practices that exposed them to suspicion and boarding.
They have transferred Russian oil from one vessel to another on the high seas to disguise its provenance. They have turned off their trackers to avoid monitoring, falsified their positions, evaded insurance obligations, and flown false flags. The catalyst for using Article 110 against these practices was the US, which invoked it late last year to board vessels evading US Department of the Treasury sanctions against the export of Venezuelan oil in Operation Southern Spear.
With help from the UK, US Marines seized the Russian-owned Bella I, sanctioned for carrying Iranian and Venezuelan as well as Russian oil, in the North Atlantic last January. The UK and France have since boarded several other vessels under UNCLOS rules. Although these inspections are few compared to the hundreds of shadow tankers afloat, they have put pressure on the shadow fleet, experts said.
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