The Channel has become the front line of the West's economic war on Russia – one Moscow is winning

Telegraph

14-03-2025

Exactly an hour after sunset on February 10, a weather-beaten tanker named Destan weighed anchor in Russia's port of Primorsk and set off across the Baltic.
Inside the ship's red and black hull, streaked and discoloured by 17 years of plying the oceans, lay up to 750,000 barrels of Russian oil worth about $50 million.
Before Vladimir Putin launched his onslaught against Ukraine in 2022, this precious cargo would probably have been carried on board a Western vessel, like most Russian oil exports.
Today, Destan, flying the flag of Panama, is one of a rapidly growing armada of 600 'shadow fleet' tankers, dedicated to breaking sanctions by transporting oil from Russia and other targeted countries to willing buyers, usually in China or India.
Destan's latest voyage demonstrates how the 'shadow fleet' allows Putin to evade the toughest sanctions ever imposed on any nation, funding the invasion of Ukraine and exploiting the North Sea and the Channel as vital arteries of Russia's war economy.
Every day, about 15 tankers carrying Russian oil steam past the white cliffs of Dover and onwards through the Channel, laden with sanctioned crude worth tens of millions of pounds, destined to pay for the guided missiles, drones and bullets of Putin's war machine.
While there is no evidence of foul play by Moscow, the collision between a container vessel captained by a Russian and a US-chartered tanker in the North Sea this week illustrates how British waters are both crucial for global commerce and acutely vulnerable.
Earlier this year, the Royal Navy challenged a Russian spy ship believed to be gathering intelligence and mapping critical underwater infrastructure. And this month, a British frigate spent three days tracking a Russian warship as it escorted a cargo vessel, believed to have been carrying weapons from Syria, through the Channel.
Destan, however, encountered no visible difficulties on her voyage. After leaving Primorsk, she struck westwards across the Gulf of Finland, making a steady 12 knots, with the Estonian coast to port and Finland to starboard.
Five days sailing brought her through the Baltic to the Danish Straits, where she came within two or three miles of Denmark's island of Langeland, before entering the North Sea early on Feb 17.
By this stage, Destan had steamed past the Baltic coastlines of eight Nato allies. Her transponders were switched on and her position publicly available on marinetraffic.com. Each country had, in effect, looked on passively while another $50 million for Putin's war effort sailed by.
Plenty more 'shadow fleet' vessels would have been in the Baltic. Lloyd's List, the world's oldest and most authoritative shipping journal, reported in 2023 that 10 per cent of all the world's tankers were part of this new armada; other more recent estimates range as high as 17 per cent.
Now Destan turned to port and headed south-west across the North Sea; by 1pm on February 18 the tanker was about 10 miles east of Broadstairs in Kent. As she entered the congested shipping lanes of the Channel, the vessel altered course to starboard and cut her speed below 10 knots.
At 3pm on February 18, Destan passed about six miles from Dover, travelling at 9.8 knots, on a day with minimal cloud cover when she would have been easily visible from the white cliffs. Other tankers carrying Russian oil would almost certainly have passed Dover earlier that day and more would have followed.
Destan spent the next 24 hours steaming along the south coast of England at a steady 9.8 knots. By 7pm she was about 10 miles off Eastbourne; five hours later, she was 25 miles from the Royal Navy's biggest base at Portsmouth.
In the early hours of February 19, she passed 15 miles south of Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, before leaving the Channel and entering the Atlantic after nightfall.
Lloyd's List defines a 'shadow fleet' tanker as one 'aged 15 years or over, anonymously owned, solely deployed in sanctioned oil trades, and engaged in one or more of the deceptive shipping practices'.
As Destan steamed southwards across the mouth of the Bay of Biscay and onwards past the Spanish and Portuguese coasts, the British Government woke up to the fact that she met this definition.
Publicly available information shows that Destan was launched in 2008, engaged in carrying Russian oil, and sheltered by an ownership structure as complex as any matryoshka doll.
On Feb 24, the Foreign Office identified the ship as being 'involved in activity whose object or effect is to destabilise Ukraine' by 'carrying oil and/or oil products that originated in Russia from Russia to a third country'.
From that moment onwards, the vessel was subject to UK sanctions, preventing her from calling at British ports and making her subject to a 'port barring' or 'detention direction'.
Yet on the same day, Destan steamed brazenly past the British overseas territory of Gibraltar, coming within 10 miles of the Rock once known as the impassable fortress of the Mediterranean.
Her voyage continued eastwards towards Sicily and then the Suez Canal before, for the first time, Destan finally felt sufficiently vulnerable to take precautions. On March 5, south of Jeddah in the Red Sea, the tanker switched off her transponders and went dark for the next four days.
This was not because of British sanctions or any other counter-measures arising from her cargo of sanctioned Russian oil. Instead, Destan was passing by the coast of Yemen where Houthi rebels have frequently launched missiles against nearby ships.
After navigating the danger zone, Destan's transponders came back to life on March 9 as she steamed eastwards across the Arabian Sea, bound for the Indian port of Vadinar in the state of Gujarat, where she dropped anchor at 7.42pm local time on Thursday having transported her oil over 7,700 nautical miles.
Why wasn't her voyage interrupted by the British authorities as she passed through the Channel? Tom Sharpe, who commanded four warships during 27 years in the Royal Navy, points out that every vessel has a right of 'innocent passage' through the territorial waters of a coastal state under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
Having largely invented maritime law, Britain has always defended the principle of freedom of the seas, even launching air strikes against the Houthis in Yemen last year after repeated attacks on shipping.
'You can't uphold freedom of navigation around the world – in the Red Sea for example – and then board a ship just because you want to,' says Sharpe.
There are legal grounds for intercepting a ship but 'suspecting a tanker of carrying sanctioned oil isn't one of them,' he adds. 'Then there's a numbers problem. What are you going to carry out this boarding operation with? All our warships are either busy on operations or they're in maintenance.'
At present, the Royal Navy is down to just 14 frigates and destroyers, half the number of 25 years ago, and barely sufficient to protect home waters and meet global commitments.
But the daily procession of 'shadow fleet' tankers carrying Russian oil through the Channel poses a constant risk. By definition, these are old ships, laden with hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil, often without double hulls or other modern safety precautions against spillages.
As for whether these tankers are properly insured, providers in Britain and every other G7 country will only cover tankers transporting Russian oil if they observe a 'price cap' for their cargo of $60 per barrel. The idea is to limit Putin's revenues without removing Russian oil completely from the market, which would force up world prices and cause huge pain to consumers.
But the point of the 'shadow fleet' is to dodge that restriction and sell their oil above the limit, meaning that none of its tankers has insurance from a reputable G7 provider. If any such vessel were to spill its load in the Channel, Britain would face both environmental disaster and be landed with a huge clean-up bill.
This ever-present danger creates an opening for action. Under Article 19 of UNCLOS, ships enjoy 'innocent passage' provided they do not prejudice the 'peace, good order or security of the coastal State'.
Transiting British waters without proper insurance might be held to prejudice good order and security, particularly as UNCLOS adds that ships lose the right of 'innocent passage' for 'any act of wilful and serious pollution'.
Last October, Britain began challenging any tankers carrying Russian oil to produce proper insurance and sanctioning those that failed to comply, with 150 ships listed so far, including Destan.
Sharpe says that Britain needs a 'change of mindset' and a new determination to impose a price of some kind on every tanker carrying Russian oil through British waters. Sanctioning the vessel might be one step; others could include environmental or safety inspections or any measures creating delay or inconvenience. 'So far we've just sat back and accepted this,' says Sharpe. 'Now we need to be more proactive.'
Oil spills are not the only danger. On Christmas Day last year, a 'shadow fleet' tanker, Eagle S, dragged its anchor along the Baltic seabed, cutting a series of power and telecommunications cables serving Finland.
The Channel and the North Sea are criss-crossed by pipelines and cables, carrying internet traffic, electricity and gas for millions of British households. There have already been cases of Russian vessels engaged in mapping this vital infrastructure, including the spy ship known as the Yantar, which was confronted by a Royal Navy frigate in January.
But every 'shadow fleet' tanker in British waters is a potential saboteur.
Last November, David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, promised to 'work with our G7 partners and beyond to exert relentless pressure on the Kremlin, disrupt the flow of money into its war chest, erode its military machine, and constrain its malign behaviour'.
But there is another loophole in this 'relentless' effort. Britain and the G7 have set a price cap of $100 for refined oil products exported by Russia, including diesel. Yet diesel now sells in Europe for less than $90 per barrel, meaning that any tanker shipping Russian diesel through British waters will be complying with the rules and free to buy insurance from any G7 provider.
Even the $60 cap for crude oil is not far below the current market price of $70 per barrel.
So another way of tightening the screw would be to cut the price caps. Reducing the crude oil limit to $30 per barrel would have cost Russia nearly £3 billion in January alone, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, an independent research organisation.
It doesn't help that Western shipowners have taken the opportunity to rid themselves of their oldest tankers by selling them into the 'shadow fleet' and pocketing about £4.8 billion. At least 230 tankers have been disposed of in this fashion, with Greek owners selling 127 and British companies offloading 22, according to an international investigation led by the Dutch outlet, Follow the Money.
For now, Putin's unlikely armada of obsolete, rusting, leaking but apparently unstoppable tankers is overcoming the West's economic war on Russia. The Kremlin still makes about $15 billion from oil exports every month, only marginally below the monthly average for 2021, the year before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Day after day, Destan and hundreds of other sea-scarred vessels are plying their trade and, so far, the Channel remains their highway.