A Swedish court has ordered the detention of the Russian captain of a ship suspected of sailing under a false flag as part of Moscow’s shadow fleet. The unnamed captain appeared in court in Ystad after being arrested on suspicion of using forged documents.
The coast guard boarded the 228m tanker, the Sea Owl One, in Swedish waters. The vessel was flying a Comoran flag, which authorities suspected might be bogus. The Sea Owl One is listed among vessels sanctioned by the European Union. Moscow has increasingly relied on a network of tankers with obscure ownership or insurance to circumvent Western sanctions on its oil exports.
The Sea Owl One was intercepted while traveling from Santos, Brazil, to Primorsk on Russia’s Baltic coast. The Swedish coast guard noted that the tanker had transported oil between Russia and Brazil in recent years. The Swedish Prosecution Authority confirmed the detention of the 55-year-old captain, who could be held for up to 14 days. Prosecutors stated their intention to question the captain further.
The coast guard boarded the tanker south of Trelleborg, on Sweden’s southern tip. The agency intervened due to suspicions that the ship was not properly registered in the Comoros, an African island nation, thus violating international law. Officers’ suspicions were heightened when the captain presented documents that appeared to be inauthentic.
The Russian embassy in Sweden reported that 10 of the 24 sailors aboard the Sea Owl One were Russian, with the remainder being from Indonesia. The embassy stated it was closely monitoring the situation.
This incident marks the second time in a week Swedish authorities have seized a vessel suspected of belonging to Russia’s shadow fleet. On March 6, the coast guard took control of the Caffa, a Guinean-flagged cargo ship traveling from Casablanca, Morocco, to St. Petersburg, on similar suspicions. The Caffa is suspected of carrying stolen Ukrainian grain and is currently anchored off the Trelleborg coast.
France has also seized several tankers believed to be part of Russia’s shadow fleet, including the Grinch in the Mediterranean in January and the Boracay in the Atlantic in October. Western sanctions targeting Russia’s oil exports, a significant revenue source for financing the war in Ukraine, have been in place since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Beyond evading these sanctions for oil exports, Moscow’s shadow fleet has been accused of spoofing location data, sabotaging undersea cables, and launching drones.
Fonte: BBC News
