Shadow ships: What are they and why do countries use them?
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Hello, I'm William Lee Adams, and this is What in the World from the BBC World Service.

Today, I'm taking you on a journey. Not literally, unfortunately, as my feet are staying put here in a BBC studio. Instead, we're tracing the route of a shadow ship. These ships are part of a network carrying Russian oil around the world in violation of international sanctions. They operate outside usual maritime rules, and some of them have been accused of sabotage. The shadow fleet, as it's known, is growing in size, posing a risk to other ships and the environment.

Let me explain. Guiding me on this trip is BBC reporter Amelia Jansson. So, Amelia, hi. Hello. Where are we?

We're currently at the port of Primorsk in northwestern Russia and we're standing on a huge tanker and as you can see around us there's lots of oil barrels. But what you also may notice is that the ship looks quite old. But officially this ship doesn't even exist because it's part of the Russian Shadow Fleet.

The phrase "shadow" there, that hints at something dark, mysterious, hidden. What's a shadow ship? Shadow ships are used by governments around the world who want to transport something that can't be tracked. There's no official definition of what a shadow ship is. However, experts say that these ships have certain characteristics. First of all, they're usually quite old.

Usually when a tanker reaches about 20 years of age you scrap it because it's not deemed as seaworthy. However, shadow ships tend to be older than 20 and can be up to 40 years of age. Also, it's difficult to track the owner. You usually don't actually know who the owner of a shadow ship is because they're flagged in countries such as Gabon or Panama and the company behind it is often a shell company.

So under international law, every merchant ship has to be registered with a country, which is known as its flag state. And that country is meant to be responsible for inspecting it and checking the crew's working conditions, stuff like that.

And some countries will offer to register your ship and have fewer regulations and taxes. But like I said, this makes it harder to track the ship owner and can mean that rules aren't properly enforced. They're also not regulated properly.

by official authorities. So you don't know how well trained the crew on board are, you don't even know who the crew is, you don't know how well maintained these ships are, because it's dangerous for the crew working on the ship, but it's also dangerous for all the other ships travelling around them. And why are we at a Russian port?

So since the war in Ukraine, the EU and US and other Western countries have imposed sanctions on Russian oil. They didn't want to ban the trade of Russian oil completely as that would limit the amount of oil that's available worldwide and it would make the global price of oil really high. So instead they set a price cap on it. That means you're only allowed to buy a barrel of Russian oil for $60. Anything above that is illegal.

This meant that Russia couldn't get as much money for its oil, which was a huge blow to them because they rely on oil exports to fund the war in Ukraine. So instead, they've turned to these shadow ships to sell the oil to other countries without anyone knowing who, when or how. So they're circumventing these sanctions, you know, in the darkness with these shadow ships. Now, are they the only country to use shadow ships? Yes.

No, other countries have also used these in the past. So specifically Iran, Venezuela and North Korea. I'm assuming it's quite hard to quantify, but is there a guess, an estimate on how many of these shadow ships are out there? Yes, exactly. However, the numbers I've seen are usually between 500 to over 1,000. The Center for European Policy Analysis says that there's around 1,300 shadow ships and about half of them have links to Russia.

Lloyd's List, which is a maritime analysis firm, say that shadow ships now make up 10% of the global tanker fleet. And the Kiev School of Economics says that since 2022, Russia has invested over $10 billion into the shadow fleet. All right. So as you can hear there, this ship is on the move. Where are we going?

We're heading to the Baltic Sea, and this is the sea that ships from Russia have to pass to get out into the oceans. So we're passing countries such as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Denmark. And what all these countries have in common is that they're all becoming increasingly worried about shadow ships.

Now, you mentioned some Baltic nations there, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. All of them were, of course, part of the Soviet Union. They're now independent states in the European Union. Why are the Baltic nations in particular worried about Russian shadow ships? The sea isn't very big, and especially passing through the Danish Straits to the oceans is very, very, very narrow. The

These countries are very worried about potential dangers to the environment if there is an oil spill, for example. Because if these shadow ships do end up in trouble, which has happened in the past few years, it will be...

It will be Latvia, it will be Finland who will have to pay for the damages caused. The reason these countries have to pay is because the shadow ships are inadequately insured and therefore the responsibility falls onto the coastal states where these accidents take place. Apart from the cost, they're also worried about the damage to the environment. Oil spills are highly dangerous and it will affect the environment for many decades to come.

Another trend that has been noticed in the Baltic Sea is sabotage. This is quite recent, but these countries believe the ships are sabotaging underwater cables and this is causing huge worry for them. For example, at Christmas, right outside my hometown, a vital communications cable between Finland and Estonia was severed by a ship called Eagle S, which is part of the Russian Shadow Fleet.

NATO says it will enhance its military presence in the Baltic Sea after Russia was accused of sabotaging Estonia's main power link in the Gulf of Finland. Yesterday, the Finnish Coast Guard boarded an oil tanker suspected of damaging the undersea cable. And although there were backup cables, so there was no immediate impact on people in Finland, it still caused lots of issues and troubles for the Finnish government. And how did authorities in Estonia and Finland react to that?

In the past, the Finnish government and the Swedish government have been a bit careful in their approach. This time, however, they immediately realized something was wrong, boarded the ship, detained the crew and took control of the ship.

So when you talk about the damage to these cables, how is that being done? Are scuba divers going down there with bolt cutters? That's a very good idea, but not actually what's taking place. Instead, the ships are dragging the anchor on the bottom of the sea. And with the case of Eagle S, it dragged its anchor for several kilometers and it went straight through the cables.

Eagle S have said that it was an accident, but people who work in the shipping industry say it's impossible that they had accidentally let their anchor down and hadn't noticed the drag. I'm hearing a change. It seems like our ship is turning. Where are we headed now?

So we've managed to squeeze past the Danish Straits, and now we're going past the Netherlands, the English Channel, France, Spain, and we've ended up in the Laconian Gulf outside of Greece. So we've traveled quite the distance there. How did this ship, and shadow ships more generally, how did they avoid being tracked?

So what shadow ships do is that they either turn off or manipulate their AIS system. And the AIS system is what ships use to show other vessels nearby where they're traveling. So everyone knows where each other is to avoid collisions on the sea. However, what the shadow ships are doing is, like I said, they're either turning it off completely or they're manipulating it to look like they're somewhere else where they're not.

And this can be very dangerous because it means other ships only know that this shadow vessel is there when they see it with their own eyes. You mentioned attacks on cables earlier. What are some of the other reasons that European countries would worry about these ships?

There's something called ship-to-ship transfers, STS. This is when one ship moves their cargo to another ship out in the open sea. These two ships move side to side. They can either stop in the open water or they continue travelling and the oil barrels will be transported from one ship to another. But this is a very dangerous operation and it's especially dangerous for the environment. And there's no oversight.

Really, it should be done in a port where it's more safe and the ships are static and not moving. Experts know that Russian shadow ships are doing this a lot and they're especially doing this in the Laconian Gulf.

And the reason this is such a hotspot for STS is because it's quite close to Russian ports in the Black Sea and it's also not too far away from the Suez Canal, which will be the next stop for these ships. BBC journalist Tim Huell actually went to the Laconian Gulf and travelled out into the sea to watch these ship-to-ship transfers. Good morning. Good morning.

We're heading out in a small boat, usually used for tourist trips, to observe the transfers close up.

It'll take more than an hour to reach the tankers because they stay far out in international waters. We have more than 10 miles. More than 10 miles to go? To go, yeah. So how many boats usually? It's always 20, 30. 20 or 30? A lot of boats, always. So we've cut the...

the engines now, oh it's rocking now quite a lot, a mile from these vessels and so even without the binoculars I can see the crane on deck one of them and this is the crane that lifts up the hose that takes the oil from one to the other. I can yeah I can just see that the gap in between the two and that's where the huge air balloons, the fenders are keeping them apart

Okay, so now we're at the port, what's going to happen to the cargo? The oil is being unloaded to its buyer. And the top importers of Russian oil that we've seen include countries such as China, India, Turkey, the UAE, and Egypt. Now, if you can't see a shadow ship, it's quite hard to monitor a shadow ship. What can be done to stop these fleets?

That's what European and other Western governments are grappling with. It's quite expensive to sanction individual ships and it's a lot easier to just add more shadow ships to the fleet.

In January, NATO announced that they're establishing the Baltic Sentry, which is an operation to increase their military presence in the Baltic specifically to protect critical infrastructure such as cables. But there are other ways of tackling this issue. For example, encouraging Western shipmakers to stop selling their old aging tankers to the Shadow Fleet.

The OCCRP, which is the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and Follow the Money, which is an investigative reporting platform, discovered that Western ship owners have made over $6.3 billion selling their really old tankers to the Shadow Fleet.

And it makes sense why you would do it, because if you've got an old ship and you have to scrap it, you have to pay to get it scrapped. However, this way, they're actually earning money by selling it indirectly to the Russian shadow fleet. If a country did crack down on these shadow ships, if they detained a ship and its crew, for instance, do we have any sense how Russia would respond?

Denmark recently announced that they're going to start cracking down more on these tankers by boarding and inspecting them more and trying to see if they have the correct insurance. And Russia immediately responded by saying that any attack on our carriers can be regarded as an attack on our territory, even if the ship is under a foreign flag.

You mentioned that NATO wants to crack down on these shadow fleets, but who actually governs the sea? No one governs the sea, and that's part of the problem. There is no one organisation that could crack down on this and that has the authority over all of the seas around the world. Instead, maritime law and regulations is a patchwork that has kind of been built throughout the years, and it's reliant on nations

every other actor to follow these rules. However, what shadow ships are doing is creating a parallel sector and completely ripping up all these rules and regulations that have existed for hundreds of years. Amelia, all right, we are at the port. Thank you for explaining that. I think it's time to go get lunch. Thank you. Thanks for listening to another episode of What in the World from the BBC World Service. I'm William Lee Adams. We'll see you next time.