The Muscovite dictator and the mullahs of Iran are profiting from a huge fleet of unsafe rust buckets

Tom Sharpe

Tom Sharpe OBE served for 27 years as a Royal Navy officer, commanding four different warships

11 February 2026

The “dark” or “shadow” fleet of basically illegal, unregulated oil tankers carrying sanctioned oil from unsavoury regimes – first and foremost, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but also Iran and Venezuela – to unscrupulous buyers in places such as India and China is becoming a more and more serious issue.

There are now thought to be 1400 ships in the dark fleet. The big problem with them, of course, is that they are bankrolling Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine and the Iranian regime’s murderous oppression of its own people. They are also a hazard in their own right: they are poorly maintained, unsafely operated and seldom insured. They damage undersea infrastructure such as communications cables (which carry more than 95 per cent of all data), they pollute the seas and it is only a matter of time until there is a major environmental disaster somewhere which will not be covered by insurance.

These ships have unclear ownership, switch flags regularly or have no registered nationality. They disable or spoof their Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders, which is a safety violation and makes them harder to track. Their shadowy owners often simply abandon them in the event of problems: In 2025 some 6,000 seafarers on 410 vessels were left without pay or provisions. Trading companies believe there to be at least 100 vessels now at sea without even a crew, drifting with whatever cargo they had when they were abandoned – typically crude oil but possibly something even nastier like ammonia – and waiting for a current to wash them up on a beach or coral reef.

So why isn’t something done?

The short answer is that international law makes boarding and seizing ships on the high seas – or even in British, European or US waters – a complicated business. A warship can board a stateless vessel, and the US has been doing this: the most high profile case was the boarding of the Bella 1 off Iceland recently.

The case of the Bella 1 illustrates how complex these situations can get, both legally and tactically. It was thought that the tanker’s crew might offer armed resistance, which led to some reluctance to use a normal helicopter boarding team delivered to the deck by rope. A helicopter in this situation must hover almost completely stationary to avoid risk to the descending team, and is in significant danger of being shot down even by ordinary rifle fire. It would then be likely to crash on the deck in a chaos of spinning rotor blades and exploding aviation fuel – possibly accompanied by an even bigger explosion involving the tanker’s cargo – which would probably not be survivable for the boarding team.

On that occasion it was decided to send in US Navy SEALs, America’s premier maritime special forces, carried by MH-6 “Little Bird” special-ops helicopters which can set down almost anywhere, including a tanker’s deck, allowing the troops riding on their sides to step straight off.

These special personnel and aircraft had to be flown to bases in the UK on transport planes before the operation could take place. Meanwhile the legal waters were muddied as the ship renamed itself Marinera and registered in Russia, hoping to deter the boarding.

It didn’t work and the ship was seized, nominally by the US Coast Guard cutter Munrorather than the US Special Operations Command with assistance from the UK armed forces, and taken to anchor in Scottish waters – where she remains today. Further legal complications followed when the apparent wife of the ship’s captain, one Avtandil Kalandadze, petitioned in Edinburgh to prevent his and his first mate’s transfer to the US. The Scottish court ruled in the lady’s favour, but in fact Kalandadze and his Number One ended up heading for the US aboard the Munro anyway.

The US has conducted at least eight other seizures since December 2025, including the Aquila II in the Indian Ocean and the Veronica in the Caribbean in January 2026 – the sixth Venezuela-linked seizure. France, Finland, Germany and Estonia have all conducted enforcement actions such as seizure or detention. More ships are adopting the Russian flag – though just as the West would struggle to board and seize the many hundreds of dark fleet ships, Russia could never protect them all either.

The UK has so far done nothing but lend a hand with the Bella 1/Marinera, though there has been some tough talk from ministers about the Money Laundering Act, rather than the maritime laws used by other nations to justify their actions. Odd when you consider we have said three times now that we will carry out boardings and around a dozen sanctioned tankers pass through the English Channel per week. The speed with which the Edinburgh courts attempted to put a spanner in the Bella 1/Marinera works may offer a clue as to one reason why we aren’t doing anything.

However there are some signs that action may be coming at last. The European Union’s 20th sanctions package against Russia, proposed by the European Commission on 6 February 2026, could be a significant development. It includes a full ban on maritime services for Russian crude oil exports. So far, it has just been ships, entities and individuals that have been sanctioned: this package is looking at sanctioning entire ports as well. It’s a belated acknowledgement that the original sanctions plan is no longer working and that tougher measures are now required. 

The measures may never happen, however, with Greece and Malta stalling progress during an EU ambassadors’ meeting on 9 February. Other countries’ positions vary: Cyprus cites generic maritime worries, whilst Baltic states like Estonia push for tougher enforcement. As ever, the political alignment required to bring all these moving parts together both legally and operationally is proving elusive.

Even the relatively aggressive US campaign of seizures has been very limited, and all in all the problem of the dark fleet and the flow of oil money to Moscow and Tehran has barely been acknowledged, let alone tackled. Putin and the mullahs are gaming the system, and innocent people in Ukraine and Iran are suffering as a result. The oceans are full of unsafe, unregulated ships, often enough adrift without crews.

We must do better.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/02/11/putins-dark-fleet-oil-to-china-and-india-special-forces/