The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank. She was owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and commanded by a sort of renegade New South Wales German who, apparently on the strength of Bismarck’s victorious policy, brutalized all those he was not afraid of, and wore a “blood-and-iron air” … After she had been painted outside and whitewashed inside, eight hundred pilgrims (more or less) were driven on board of her as she lay with steam up alongside a wooden jetty.
Replace Bismarck with Putin and oil with missionaries, and this passage from Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim could almost have been written about Russia’s mysterious shadow fleet. The puzzling question of why Western sanctions have failed to cripple the Russian economy almost three years after the invasion of Ukraine finds an answer far out to sea in a convoy of clinkered, clapped-out hulks. One such vessel, Eagle S, was seized by Finnish authorities last week, who are investigating whether the ship was involved in severing an undersea power cable. Their inquiries may reveal that these vessels are now being used to actively sabotage European infrastructure. But the Eagle S is part of a much larger network, one that has kept the money flowing for the Kremlin’s war effort for years now – all while posing a grave threat to the environment and human life.
The life expectancy of an oil tanker is 15 years. For actuarial purposes, it’s written off after that. But Moscow has turned to creaking, rusty vessels, some of them twice as old, to deliver its supplies of crude oil, its key national export, to willing buyers including China, India and Turkey. The fuel is sold above the price cap of $60 which was imposed by Washington and its allies in order to choke off the revenue at Putin’s disposal. The sanctioning countries chose to let Russia continue trading to avoid a global oil shortage and an accompanying price hike. This black moonshine lubricates the black economy, selling below the international market rate, which touched $80 a barrel in October. The beggars in the Kremlin can’t be choosers, not that they could care less: this trade has put billions into their war chest.
An oil tanker is one of the biggest man-made structures on Earth – and getting bigger. Maritime architecture has supersized in inverse proportion to the construction permitted in many places on dry land, which is increasingly cramped and constrained. Can’t get permission for your high-rise hotel? No problem, just build it at sea: a buxom cruise liner that can accommodate as many holidaymakers as an entire resort. The largest oil tankers at sea today have a capacity of 550,000 DWT (dead weight tonnage), or half a million tons fully loaded. As big as these leviathans are, the sea is infinitely bigger and growing all the time as water levels rise. It’s vast, impenetrable and hostile. As Conrad’s stories remind us, few environments are capable of bringing out the good and bad in people like the sea. Incalculable tracts of it are beyond the law, where the writ of nation states carries no weight, and are subject only to the niceties of conventions which rogue operators don’t always observe. The world has no maritime police force, and charterers and crews have taken advantage of that for almost as long as there has been shipping. But Putin has weaponised it as never before.
Most of those visiting Helsinki can remain oblivious to this dark trading route. From the restaurant of the city’s Löyly spa they enjoy an unblemished view of the Gulf of Finland: low sky, rocky islets dotted with strands of birch in their rufous autumn colours, a tugboat towing a barge. Further out in the channel, however, is the old maritime bastion of Suomenlinna, a garrison established in the 18th century on one of the larger inhabited islands of this vast archipelago. On Suomenlinna, the old Orthodox church is shut up. The barrels of decommissioned cannons form an honour guard, their muzzles buried in the ground, no doubt as a symbol of peace. In all, there’s a population of 800 on Suomenlinna, including a happy playground of nursery children swaddled in padded coats and bobble hats. But trippers who stray off the scenic route will find no-entry signs and electronic surveillance equipment blinking at them. There’s still a military base on the island, confirms the young man behind the till in the supermarket. The garrison was first built by the Swedes when Finland was part of the Swedish kingdom; it was surrendered to the Russian army in 1809 and became a Russian naval base for the next hundred years. Finland annexed it in 1918 and now the Russians are the enemy. From bases like this one, the Finnish military and the border guard track Moscow’s shadow fleet.
The base has its own place in literary history, appearing in Len Deighton’s Cold War thriller set in Helsinki, Billion Dollar Brain. His unnamed protagonist has a cloak-and-dagger meeting with a contact aboard the ferry to the island, and their fellow passengers include soldiers reporting for duty at Suomenlinna. The billion-dollar brain of Deighton’s story is a futuristic bit of tech financed by a secretive American tycoon who hopes to bring down communism. When Deighton was writing almost 60 years ago, before mobile phones and voicemail – even before telephone answering machines – this “brain” was essentially a tape-recorder. The agents doing the tycoon’s dirty work call in to receive their orders or report progress. I think Deighton intends his gadget to seem risible; to the modern reader, it’s been overtaken by history. Something rather different is happening in the new cold war, in the sea around Suomenlinna: the Russian dark fleet is an old-fangled idea overtaken by history and made to seem very smart indeed.
Since 2023, according to evidence presented to the European parliament last November, more than 2,500 Russian oil tankers have sailed through the Baltic Sea, most of them belonging to the shadow fleet. Many of them were on an international blacklist, ships “for repair or scrap”. Nor had any reputable underwriter taken them on. Because of the sanctions, insurers like Lloyd’s of London cannot offer cover for ships carrying Russian oil unless it is sold in compliance with the price cap. If the ships were insured at all, it was in Russia, and those guarantees are not worth the paper they’re written on, according to maritime sources. Since sanctions were imposed in December 2022, Moscow has spent up to $10 billion mustering 350 or more dark ships which move about 4 million barrels of oil a day, 1.5 million of them through the Baltic.
A byzantine bureaucracy surrounds the shadow vessels, hiding them from official inspection. Opaque offshore structures such as shell companies make it hard to pin down how and where the ships were acquired and who owns them. It’s been reported that Lukoil, Russia’s second largest energy company, provided funds to operate more than 20 tankers through an associated company in Dubai. There is no suggestion that laws were broken. Although the United States imposed sanctions on Lukoil ten years ago, the Dubai company itself is not subject to such measures. Nor are Dubai-based firms required to comply with the West’s restrictions, provided that they don’t receive funding from G7 countries. The fleet sail under flags of convenience including the pennants of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, the Cook Islands, Guyana, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, San Marino and Sierra Leone: the proverbial sunny places for shady people. More than 100 tankers joined the registries of these dominions in 2024, according to Michelle Wiese Bockmann of Lloyds List Intelligence, a sister company of Lloyds List, which analyses seaborne trade. The Cook Islands alone proudly doubled its fleet in just seven months, adding 50 tankers of 20,000 DWT or more.
“We haven’t seen these vessels before,” says Mikko Hirvi, deputy commander of the Finnish Coast Guard, part of the country’s border guard. “They’re older than the ones we’re used to, and the competence of the crews in Baltic conditions, especially during winter and the ice navigation period, is unknown.” A genial, balding man in the inky blue fatigues of the coastguard, Hirvi tells me that many of the tankers are not “ice class”, meaning that they aren’t approved for navigating sea ice. In the deep freeze of a typical Nordic winter, the Gulf of Finland is entirely icebound. On 12 February last year, for example, a brutally cold day, ice covered 135,000 square kilometres of the gulf. Ships travelling from St Petersburg had to batter their way through 186 nautical miles of ice, of which 120 were “thicker ice”, in the suitably cool terminology of scientists at the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
Groaning, rivet-popping bathtubs negotiating a frozen sea with little or no relevant experience on the bridge gives men like Hirvi sleepless nights. “There are some vessels that are familiar to us,” he says, but they’ve changed their flags and are not necessarily insured by the big maritime insurance companies. In the case of an oil spill, this could have a serious effect, since it is possible that the familiar “polluter pays” rule cannot be implemented. The risk of an oil spill, and of deploying maritime search and rescue, has increased in the Gulf in the past two years.” A catastrophic breach of a tanker’s hull in the Baltic wouldn’t altogether suit the Kremlin – there are the lost millions in revenue to consider – but if a tragic accident were to happen, it’s not entirely inconsistent with Putin’s playbook of disrupting Western allies on his borders. The shadow fleet is disavowed, deniable. The seizure of the Eagle S by Finnish police was a very rare case of Western authorities intercepting a Russian tanker. Coastguards like Hirvi and his men can’t lay a finger on the rust-bucket convoys. “We don’t have powers for inspecting, boarding, interfering or something like that,” he admits.
To guard against environmental risks, the Finns want the EU to send a ship which is capable of responding to an oil spill in icy conditions into the northern Gulf of Finland, close to Russia’s oil-exporting ports of Ust-Luga and Primorsk, both within a 200-mile radius of Helsinki. This isn’t a drill. A shadow fleet merchantman, Ceres I, was involved in a dramatic accident in 2023 in Malaysian waters. Ceres I collided with the tanker Hafnia and both burst into flames. The crews had to be rescued and at least two sailors were hospitalised. “The crews of these ships are marginalised people, often from India and the Philippines, making about 800 dollars on these shitty old ships,” says Wiese Bockmann. “They might have no idea that they’re in the dark fleet.” The crash produced an oil spill covering about 17 square kilometres (6.5 square miles). The 23-year-old Ceres I, which was sailing under the flag of São Tomé and Príncipe, turned off its tracking system and fled the scene like a panicking motorist with no insurance.
Of course, technology can put eyes in the sky over vessels of interest. The Royal Navy was flying drones above the Red Sea a year ago after the Houthis began firing on shipping. But costs and logistics, as well as brute geography, are limiting factors. And the shadow fleet has become adept at giving pursuers the slip. The Russians are accused of jamming GPS signals. The disruption was so serious in Finland that the national airline Finnair suspended flights to Tartu, Estonia, for a month, after two of its aircraft had to turn back to Helsinki. Wiese Bockmann says shadow fleet ships regularly use the trick pulled by Ceres I when it switched off its digital profile, or Automatic Identification System. Rather more crudely, they also paint out any identifying signage on hulls. They sometimes offload their cargoes onto other ships while at sea, further disguising the origins of the oil. “A dozen or so of the dark fleet pass through the English Channel every 24 hours. They have the right of innocent passage, as it’s called, and they can’t be stopped,” says Wiese Bockmann. “It’s an accident waiting to happen.”
There are signs that Western powers are waking up to the big hole that Russia’s fugitive traders are ploughing through their sanctions. The British government announced in September that it was taking measures against 10 named ships in the dark fleet; three of them alone have transported oil valued at £5 billion since the invasion of Ukraine. That said, it’s difficult to know how much of a crimp the curbs will put in this unlicensed merchant marine: the ships are now prohibited from entering a UK port and will be denied access to the UK Ship Register, privileges which these dubious freighters can never seriously have hoped to enjoy. They’re also known as the phantom fleet, and there’s something ghostly about the Mary Celeste craft that wander the high seas, as plain as day but untouchable.
Helsinki Cathedral, white as a whale’s tooth, overlooks Senate Square, a quad of 18th-century government buildings close to the harbour. Rising over their rooftops is the shark’s fin of an ocean-going funnel. The smokestack belongs to a pneumatic cruise liner, in port while her passengers spend time ashore. Of the shadow fleet, there is nothing to see and nothing to hear.
Perhaps that can change as the Finns continue their investigations into the Eagle S, and the world wakes up to this hidden armada. For many critics, Conrad’s Lord Jim is about a man reckoning with his conscience and his honour over the fate of the hapless missionaries on the anonymous ship the Patna. But though Jim and his creator wring their hands over what this says about his character, any half-decent brief would get this hired hand off today and would be telling the court that a better use of its time would be going after “the Chinaman and the Arab” instead – the man who owned the Patna and the man who chartered her.
[See also: How the City of London keeps Putin’s oil flowing]
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