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20-02-2026
PARIS: France says it has released an oil tanker suspected of being part of Russia’s sanctions-busting “shadow fleet!” after its owner paid a fine.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the vessel, named Grinch, was “leaving French waters” on Tuesday having paid a penalty of “several million euros”.
The tanker was seized by French forces in the Mediterranean in January and then diverted to the port city of Marseille. It had set sail from Murmansk in northern Russia and was flying under a Comoros flag, officials said.
Moscow’s so-called shadow fleet is a clandestine network of tankers used to evade Western sanctions on Russian oil exports by using aged tankers with obscure ownership or insurance.
Many Western countries imposed sanctions on Russian oil after it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Circumventing European sanctions comes at a price. Russia will no longer be able to finance its war with impunity through a ghost fleet off our coasts,” Barrot said in a post on social media.
He added: “The tanker Grinch will leave French waters after shelling out several million euros and three weeks of costly immobilization at Fos-sur-Mer. Let’s keep it up.”
“As part of a guilty plea procedure the company that owns the vessel was sentenced by the Marseille judicial court to a financial penalty of confiscation,” the public prosecutor’s office and regional maritime authorities said in a statement.
The exact amount the vessel’s owner was fined was unclear.
Shadow fleets are becoming increasingly common. A growing number of tankers transporting Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil are using a variety of methods to conceal their identities and contravene Western sanctions.
While estimates vary, data from the monitoring group TankerTrackers.com suggests the fleet currently consists of 1,468 vessels, roughly triple its size at the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago.
The vessels tend to be old and are often poorly maintained. Details of ownership and management are deliberately opaque – names, identification numbers and flags are frequently changed.
Efforts have been stepped up to tackle shadow fleets in recent months and a number of sanctioned tankers have been seized.
In January, British armed forces supported a US operation to seize a Russian-flagged tanker in the Atlantic that US officials said had broken sanctions by carrying oil for Venezuela and Russia.
Moscow denounced the move, saying no state had the right to use force against vessels properly registered in other states’ jurisdictions.
British armed forces supported the US seizure of a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the North Atlantic on Wednesday, the Ministry of Defence has said.
The Marinera, a Venezuelan-linked tanker previously known as the Bella 1, was stopped by the US Coast Guard, as it travelled northwards through waters between Iceland and Scotland.
Last month, the MoD said the US asked the UK for assistance, and RAF surveillance aircraft and a Royal Navy support ship, the RFA Tideforce, took part in the operation.
Defence Secretary John Healey said the action was “in full compliance with international law”, adding the UK “will not stand by as malign activity increases on the high seas”. In a statement to MPs on Tuesday explaining why the UK joined the operation, Healey said the government was “stepping up activity against shadow vessels”. In a post, the US military’s European Command thanked the MoD for its “unwavering support” during the operation. (Int’l News Desk)
