The sky was grey and there was a dusting of snow on the ground. Mid-November in Denmark does not offer ideal beach weather, but the Nyborg waterfront did have a view of the cargo ships passing through the Great Belt, a major strait in Denmark and one of the busiest sea lanes in the world.
From the beach, Kristina Siig, a university professor specializing in maritime law, pointed out a massive bridge. Storebæltsbroen, or “Great Belt Bridge,” links two of Denmark’s largest islands: Funen and Zealand.
“As you can see, there’s a low bridge over here and there’s a high bridge in the middle where the vessels can get under it,” Siig said.
The Great Belt, along with the The Sound due east, are among the few options for seagoing cargo heading in or out of the Baltic Sea. Around 70,000 ships pass through these two waterways every year, according to authorities.
An international treaty called the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, makes the high volume of sea traffic possible.
“UNCLOS basically allows vessels ‘innocent passage’, even through other people’s territorial waters,” Siig explained.
But a growing number of ships are passing through these waters that Denmark would rather not welcome. Collectively, these ships are known as Russia’s “shadow fleet,” and they carry sanctioned Russian crude oil out of the Baltic.
Experts say these vessels have dubious insurance, opaque ownership and are often ready for the scrap heap.
About a third of Russia’s crude oil shipped by sea leaves from the country’s Baltic ports, and overall around 80% are members of the shadow fleet, according to Vaibhav Raghunandan, an Amsterdam-based analyst with the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
Former head of the Danish Navy, Nils Wang, also said that these so-called shadow tankers heighten the risk of accidents, which could lead to environmental pollution along Denmark’s coast.
“If they are full of oil and if they collide with another ship because the [people on them] are drunk or not awake, or if they run aground … then you have a huge problem,” Wang said.
Adding to the concern, he said, are the crews’ risky maneuvers, like ship-to-ship oil transfers when they are in a hurry and lack the proper equipment. To avoid detection, the crews sometimes switch off important tracking systems and often refuse assistance from local pilots.
While major oil spills have been a relative rarity in Danish waters, a recent sinking in the Black Sea raised concerns about the shadow fleet’s lack of transparency regarding ships.
Earlier this month, a Russian oil tanker sank while another ran aground in the Black Sea during a storm, spilling at least 4,000 tons of oil. Video captured from what appears to be the bridge of the Volgoneft 212 shows the bow split off and bobbing nearly upright in the chop as a dark pool of oil forms on the surface of the water.
While these weren’t shadow tankers, “it does raise concerns, no doubt,” said Sergey Vakulenko, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “On the other hand, this is not the first accident of this kind. These Volga tankers, particularly converted ones, are known for accidents of various sorts, mostly because they’re just truly old.”
The Volgoneft tankers were over 50 years old and originally intended for river voyages rather than the open sea, he said. By comparison, Vakulenko’s own research found that the oceangoing ships of Russia’s shadow fleet tended to be older than 17 years but were in their 20s at the oldest. He said ships of that age are not unheard of in other tanker fleets.
While many Western countries and analysts say that the shadow fleet poses environmental risks to coastal countries like Denmark, Vakulenko said the risks are overstated: Despite what happened over the weekend in the Black Sea, the risk of tankers—including those of the shadow fleet — causing an oil spill is statistically low.
“Usually, the discussion on how dangerous the shadow fleet tankers are is based on anecdotal evidence, and that’s where I have a problem with it,” said Vakulenko, who previously worked for Gazprom Neft, one of Russia’s largest oil producers. As he sees it, all this hubbub about the fleet causing an environmental catastrophe is nothing more than a pretext for enforcing Western sanctions.
Although sanctions dented Russia’s oil revenues, for example, the country has earned almost $600 billion off oil sales since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. That’s in part due to the shadow fleet but also because Western countries need Russian oil even as they sanction it.
“This is oil that is basically funding genocide,” said analyst Raghunandan. “This is oil that is going to circumvent sanctions. And this is oil that is going into third countries that will refine this and then give you the refined product which you are benefiting [from] despite trying to look the other way.”
While sanctions prohibit Western countries from importing Russian crude oil by sea, there’s nothing to prevent countries like India, Turkey or China from buying it, refining it and then selling it back to the United States, as well as European countries.
Raghunandan said that as a result, an average of three shadow fleet tankers pass through Danish waters every day.
“It’s a problem we helped create for ourselves and the irony is not lost on many, I don’t think,” said maritime law expert Siig.
Denmark is exploring its options and Siig believes UNCLOS might hold at least one answer: Under the treaty, coastal countries are not allowed to block ships making “innocent passage” through their waters, but it does permit countries to take actions to protect their environment. Siig said that might mean Danish officials could stop a ship to inspect its required insurance certificates.
Because Western companies have a near monopoly on insurance for oil tankers, shadow vessels are forced to find more dubious sources. That makes the insurance a potential way to identify a vessel as part of the Russian shadow fleet, said Raghunandan.
Analysts seem to agree that sanctioning individual ships is currently one of the most effective ways to tighten the screws on the shadow fleet.
The European Union announced another round of sanctions against Russia, including some three dozen vessels identified as belonging to the fleet. As it stands, 79 of the ships are no longer welcome at European ports.
While it may seem more of a game of whack-a-mole, Raghunandan said there may be early indications that it’s also helped deter countries from buying Russian crude oil.
For example, “We’ve seen that [India’s] volume of Russian imports dropped by 55% in November,” he said. “And one of the reasons for this is because the EU has sanctioned vessels.”
Raghunandan proposes sanctioning refineries heavily reliant on Russian crude oil that also export little refined oil to the European Union, meaning the impact on Europe’s supply would be low.
He added, “So cutting off, threatening to sanction … supply from these refineries … still is going to have a significant effect.”
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