In a cat-and-mouse game, Russian oil tankers are flying new flags

BY Rebecca R. Ruiz and Jacob Judah

London: The Jaguar, a tanker the length of nearly five Olympic-size swimming pools, left a port near St. Petersburg, Russia, last year, bound for India and loaded with Russian oil.

Its trip that spring came as Western authorities were frantically trying to piece together the network to which it belonged: one of shadowy ships with hidden owners on whom powerful Russians relied to transport the nation's valuable oil.

But by a quirk of the shipping industry, the Jaguar had ties to the West. The tanker flew the flag of St. Kitts and Nevis, which has its maritime registry just outside London -- some 20 miles from the very British authorities who chase Russia's assets around the world and chart its oil shipments.

After unloading the oil, the Jaguar would soon switch to a more obscure flag, the Central African nation of Gabon. With an act of paperwork, the Russian tanker had moved beyond the reach of Western financial authorities.

Dozens of tankers have made similar moves over the past year and a half, records show, as Moscow has worked to protect its so-called dark fleet in the face of international pressure to limit the market for Russian oil.

It is the latest in a cat-and-mouse game that Russian President Vladimir Putin has played with the West since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As American, European and British authorities have pursued, frozen and seized Russian money worldwide, Putin has found ever new ways to evade their grip.

In doing so, he has shaped a new world order of companies and countries willing to transact with Russia. He has assembled an economy largely independent of the dollar, the euro or the pound -- and increasingly beyond the reach of regulators.

Under Western sanctions, Russia is permitted to sell oil, but at a capped price. That is intended to stunt Moscow's profits and keep oil prices from spiking. Russia has devised a workaround by using its dark fleet to sell to buyers in countries like India and China, which are not bound by the price cap.

The Jaguar and other tankers like it are examples of Russian assets that maintained bureaucratic links to the West, even as government officials hunted for Kremlin-linked money.

Just as the St. Kitts and Nevis ship registry is operated out of Britain, two major maritime shipping authorities, Liberia and the Marshall Islands, run their operations from the Washington suburbs. Whether American and British regulators were unaware, preoccupied or simply unsure whether they had jurisdiction to act, dark-fleet tankers remained untouched more than a year into the war.

Treasury and Justice Department officials declined to comment on the ships. In an email, the British Foreign Office indicated it was still exploring whether foreign ship registries based in Britain were obligated to comply with British sanctions.

Since July 2023, more than 85 Russian-affiliated ships changed their registrations to Gabon from Liberia, according to the maritime analytics company Windward. Among them are ships in the fleet of Sovcomflot, a state-owned Russian shipping company that has been the subject of Western sanctions.

With that, Gabon's registry, which opened in 2018, has ballooned into one of the quickest growing in the world.

Other Russian tankers have reregistered in Panama and Palau, according to vessel registration information retrieved through MarineTraffic and Lloyd's List, providers of maritime analytics.

That maritime reshuffling has put the small countries in a position to profit off the war in Ukraine. Once a stalwart ally of the United States and France, Gabon has been increasingly friendly with Russia after a military coup in 2023. With Western exports to Russia largely frozen, Gabon has emerged as a key part of Moscow's supply chain, with Western-made aircraft parts recently flowing through a Gabonese company to Russia, according to The Moscow Times.

The Russian Embassy in London did not respond to emails requesting comment on the tankers that had registered in Gabon.

"Gabon is important to Russia because it has been willing to register tankers that other flag states have dropped under Western pressure," said Craig Kennedy, a former investment banker and now an associate at Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. "They are helping Russia develop a parallel shipping capability that makes it easier to sell oil above the price cap."

Shipping records between Russian companies and their clients are normally private, so it is virtually impossible to say whether all of the tankers that reflagged have sold Russian oil, and for what price. But The New York Times obtained invoices showing that at least three tankers belonging to Russia's dark fleet sold Russian oil last year while maintaining bureaucratic ties to the West. US Treasury officials have reviewed those same records, according to two people familiar with the Treasury review.

US officials have engaged the Gabonese government about sanctions and particular ships, according to one U.S. official. The official requested anonymity to speak about internal government matters, adding that the Group of 7 major industrialized nations behind the price cap continued to work publicly and privately to enforce it.

There are signs that Gabon is open to listening. It removed its flag from at least one ship this year after Western authorities had specifically named it as subject to sanctions.

Unlike the Sovcomflot tankers tied outright to the Russian state, the dark network to which the Jaguar belongs is part of a web far harder to trace. It has been linked opaquely to powerful players within Russia, including Rosneft, the state-controlled oil giant, and Igor Sechin, its head, who is widely considered a close ally and adviser to Putin, according to analysis of vessel registration information and two people familiar with the fleet's business network.

The Jaguar is among the vessels chartered by Voliton, a regular trader of Russian oil that the United States subjected to sanctions late last year.

The Gabonese Ministry of Transport and the Gabonese Embassy in London did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Two people who answered the phone for Intershipping Services, which runs Gabon's registry from the United Arab Emirates, declined to answer questions about their certification process and the boom in registrations.

All ships must register with a national authority, and countries with maritime registries have competed to offer lower taxes, less stringent regulations and speedy certifications.

In registering ships, authorities must certify that a vessel is seaworthy and well-insured. That Gabon has registered so many Russian tankers has contributed to its reputation for not being as strict as other jurisdictions.

Last year, a fatal explosion occurred aboard one aging tanker that had newly registered in Gabon. Another tanker registered in Gabon was detained in Gibraltar this year after its crew complained that they had not been paid in two months.