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The UK on Thursday imposed the largest round of sanctions to date against Russia’s shadow fleet, designating additional 18 oil tankers and four LNG tankers as it seeks to cut critical revenues for Vladimir Putin.
In June, the previous UK government explicitly targeted vessels identified as belonging to the shadow fleet, used by Russia to circumvent UK and G7 sanctions, in the first sanctions directly aimed at the dark fleet.
Now the new UK government is imposing sanctions on 18 more shadow fleet oil tankers which will be barred from UK ports and unable to access British maritime services, bringing the total number of oil tankers sanctioned to 43.
The UK is also sanctioning 4 more LNG tankers and Russian gas company Rusgazdobycha JSC, to ratchet up pressure on Russia’s natural gas industry.
“The UK is leading the charge against Putin’s desperate and dangerous attempts to cling on to his energy revenues, with his shadow fleet placing coastlines across Europe and the world in jeopardy,” the UK’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy said in a statement.
Russia continues to find ways to circumvent Western sanctions and is defying one of the latest measures, the blacklisting of dozens of oil tankers for carrying Russian oil, by putting around one-third of these back to work to deliver its oil.
As of October 10, the U.S., the EU, and the UK had explicitly designated a total of 72 tankers for carrying Russian oil in violation of the sanctions or price cap. Of these 72 tankers, at least 21 vessels have loaded Russian oil cargoes since they were blacklisted, according to tanker-tracking data compiled by Bloomberg.
It looks like the UK blacklisting is the least effective, as two-thirds of the tankers sanctioned by Britain are already back to shipping Russian oil, according to the data Bloomberg has compiled.
