Russia’s shadow fleet must be stopped and sanctions reinforced

The Renew Europe Group in the European Parliament calls for more targeted sanctions on the ‘shadow fleet’ in the next sanctions packages against Russia and for enhanced EU-wide measures to ensure the immediate inspection of vessels operating in EU waters in order to verify their insurance coverage and compliance with IMO requirements.

Russia is actively circumventing EU sanctions including by operating oil tankers, which are often old vessels with unclear ownership, sailing under the flags of countries with low safety standards, which leads to these ships posing a major ecological threat in case of accidents.

On the initiative of Renew Europe, the European Parliament today adopted a resolution on EU actions against the Russian shadow fleets calling for full enforcement and extension of sanctions against Russia. Renew Europe also denounced the risk of these unsafe and uninsured Russian vessels to maritime security and calls for ship-to-ship transfers of Russian crude oil and oil products in EU waters to be banned.

Renew Europe MEP, Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy (D66, The Netherlands), said:

“Ghost ships transporting illegal Russian oil, are unmitigated natural disasters waiting to happen. Passing through our waters and past our shores. We want the European Commission and the European member states to ban these dangerous ships from our waters, and in the process enforce our European sanctions.”

Renew Europe MEP, Bernard Guetta (Independent, France), added:

“Today it is one of the largest fleets in the world. It has neither known owner nor insurance: it is the "ghost" fleet that Russia has set up to circumvent the sanctions affecting its oil exports and to finance its war against Ukraine.

It is high time we denounced this situation and to call on the Commission and the 27 European governments to act. That is the message approved today by a very large majority of the MEPs.”