Cliff’s Note:
Read this one. Putin built himself a fleet of a thousand ghost ships that no court on earth can touch. They earn him more than the entire West has sent Ukraine since the tanks rolled in, and a lot of them keep parking on top of the undersea cables that carry your money across the ocean.
Nobody has ever proven why. That’s the design, and Lawrence lays out how it got built and who decided it wasn’t worth stopping. Paid subscribers get all of it. That’s what your subscription buys.
—Cliff
by Lawrence Winnerman
I have been listening to and reading Olga Lautman and Julie Roginsky since I joined Substack, and for most of that time I have been skating past the same two words—shadow fleet. Every time I heard it, I nodded along, filed it under things I would look up later, and went back to whatever I was doing.
Last week after Cliff hosted Olga and Jacob Kaarsbo for World War NEXT, I finally looked it up. I want to tell you what I found, because I spent 25 years inside large, complicated, heavily regulated systems, and I did not know a thing like this was possible.
There are somewhere between 800 and 1,200 oil tankers at sea right now that do not, in any way a court can use, have a country.
I understood sanctions evasion in the abstract, the way everyone does, from Tom Clancy novels, or TV or the movies. Somebody swaps a label, somebody routes a payment through Dubai, somebody looks away. Cash changes hands, or these days, maybe bitcoin. What I did not understand is that the entire legal architecture of the ocean rests on one thing, and that thing is the flag a ship claims to fly, and that a flag is a product with a price.
What The Shadow Fleet Actually Is
In December 2022, the European Union embargoed seaborne Russian crude and the G7 imposed a price cap. The cap was a clever piece of design, and it resulted in everything that follows. It did not try to stop Russian oil, because stopping Russian oil would have spiked pump prices in an election year, and god forbid that happen. It said instead that Western companies could ship, insure, and finance Russian oil only if that oil sold at or below a set price, starting at $60 a barrel. Russia could sell its oil, it just couldn’t really profit from it. Neato.
Russia’s answer to this was to stop using Western companies—at all.
Over the next 3 years Moscow and its buyers assembled a parallel merchant fleet: old tankers nearing the end of their useful lives bought near scrap value, registered in countries that do not ask questions, insured by Russian firms or by nobody, owned on paper by shell companies in Dubai and Hong Kong that dissolve and reappear.
The Kyiv School of Economics, which counts the ships that actually load, found 176 shadow tankers lifting Russian crude and products in June of this year, 54% of all loadings that month. Vladyslav Vlasiuk, Ukraine’s presidential commissioner for sanctions, put the core at 400 vessels that have made 3 or more voyages from Russian ports since 2024, inside a wider range of 800 to 1,200. The European Union has now sanctioned 673 individual ships by name, with more every week.
They keep sailing, and the list of ships keeps getting bigger.
The Ghost Ships
Ninety-four percent of the tankers KSE tracked in June were more than 15 years old. A tanker’s working life runs about 20 to 25 years, after which insurers and classification societies push it toward the breakers in Bangladesh or Pakistan. The walking dead of ships, so to speak. The shadow fleet is, to a real extent, the global scrap pool bought back and put to sea, and roughly 60% of it carries no insurance any Western underwriter would recognize. One in 3 tanker transits in the Baltic now runs on Russian paper, which may or may not be worth anything at all.
Then there are the flags. A ship’s flag state is the government legally responsible for it, and small countries have sold that responsibility as a revenue line for a century. Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Gabon, Comoros, and Equatorial Guinea are all in heavy rotation. The maritime intelligence firm Windward has identified 23 countries whose flags are being flown through fraudulent registries the International Maritime Organization does not recognize at all, including Syria, Eritrea, and Myanmar.
In May, Cameroon threw 38 sanctioned tankers off its registry and notified the IMO in writing that it had done so. Twenty-four of them are still broadcasting the Cameroonian flag.
And it gets stranger. Mongolia, the second-largest landlocked country on earth, operates a flag with about 3,000 ships on it, administered by a for-profit company in Singapore that employs somewhere between 11 and 50 people. Bolivia has had no coastline since Chile took it in 1884 and runs a registry anyway. But the countries that do not run registries are the more instructive half.
In February the International Maritime Organization counted 529 vessels worldwide flying false flags, and among the flags being flown were Malawi’s, Mali’s, Botswana’s, and Lesotho’s. Lesotho is entirely surrounded by South Africa. It has no coast, no port, and no river access to the sea, and it has had to formally notify the IMO that it does not operate a ship registry, because certificates in its name somehow kept turning up on ships.
The best case is Eswatini, which is landlocked, is not an IMO member, and has never operated a registry at all. In late 2023 an Indian firm stood one up out of Singapore anyway, and inside 3 months there were 364 vessels on its books, the 3 largest of them tied to Syrian sanctions violations and to allegedly stolen Ukrainian grain. In April 2024 the IMO gave up and designated every ship claiming that flag as “False Eswatini.”
Cameroon at least had a registry to throw those 38 tankers off of. Eswatini never sold anything. Somebody built a website, and no one really knows who.
The Money
The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the shadow fleet carries about 65% of Russia’s seaborne oil, roughly 3.7 million barrels a day, worth $87 to $100 billion a year. That is more money than the entire West has sent Ukraine since the tanks crossed the border in February 2022.
The price cap now sits at $44.10 a barrel, frozen there for a year by the EU’s July sanctions package so that a war-driven price spike would not lift it automatically. Urals crude sold at about $60 in July. The gap between those two numbers, multiplied by 3.7 million barrels a day, is the entire point of this business. China took 36% of shadow fleet cargoes in June and India took 18%. The destination of the remaining 40% is logged as unknown. Just—unknown. Poof!
Forty percent of a hundred-billion-dollar trade goes somewhere nobody is writing down. I would like to know who is not looking, and why, please.
Then I Got to the Part About the Cables
Ninety-nine percent of international data moves through fiber-optic cables lying on the ocean floor. Not satellites. Cables, roughly the diameter of a garden hose in deep water, carrying the internet, interbank settlement, and military traffic between continents.
On Christmas Day 2024, a tanker called the Eagle S, flying the flag of the Cook Islands, “accidentally” dragged its anchor about 90 kilometers across the floor of the Gulf of Finland. It severed the EstLink 2 power cable between Finland and Estonia and 4 data cables along with it. Repairs took 7 months. In October 2025 a Finnish district court threw the criminal case out for lack of jurisdiction, on the theory that the damage happened outside Finnish territorial waters and belonged to the crew’s home countries or to the Cook Islands. On August 27 of this year, the Helsinki Court of Appeal reversed that and ruled that cutting a cable is not a maritime accident under the law of the sea. The case goes back to trial.
It was not the first. In October 2023 a Chinese-owned vessel named Newnew Polar Bear, outbound from a Russian port, dragged an anchor more than 100 nautical miles and broke the Balticconnector gas pipeline. Four Baltic cables have been damaged since the beginning of 2025. In May of that year Polish aircraft chased off a tanker that was circling the SwePol power cable.
No investigation has ever established intent. Not one.
