Russia uses secret transshipment of similar tankers to complicate tracing

The Oxis supertanker received about one million barrels of Russia's top-quality Urals oil from another vessel. This vessel was one of the two owned and operated by the Russian state-owned tanker company Sovcomflot PJSC.

Source: Bloomberg

Details: Identifying which vessel transferred the oil is difficult, as the two tankers are the same size and almost identical from the top. These manoeuvres show how Russia can circumvent sanctions, and how difficult it will be to constantly monitor the flow of Russian oil if it increasingly uses covert transfers.

The fact that Russian oil carriers are forced to go to such extremes, however, suggests that customers are not prepared to openly violate US sanctions by accepting Russian cargo delivered by sanctioned tankers. This will increase the cost of transporting barrels with these vessels.

Two of the tanker candidates, both sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control since February, disappeared from digital satellite tracking systems a few weeks ago.

The first tanker, the Bratsk, loaded a cargo of about a million barrels of Urals oil at the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk in May, according to shipping information seen by Bloomberg. The second, the Belgorod, did the same in early June.

Both were then picked up by automated tracking systems as they left the Black Sea through Türkiye's Bosphorus shipping strait and were tracked as they sailed across the Indian Ocean to locations south of India, where the automated tracking signals disappeared.

The Bratsk vanished from the radar on 13 June. 11 days after that, the Belgorod followed.

Both tankers have the same length and width, the same reddish-orange deck colour and the same indistinguishable pipework. But the important thing is that there are no vessels outside the Sovcomflot fleet that have the same specifications.

The VLCC Oxis transmitted a false automated signal about its location, showing that it was anchored in the Strait of Hormuz, near Iran’s Jask oil terminal. Satellite imagery, however, did not show any vessel in the area.

The Oxis was in fact about 100 miles to the southeast, in the middle of the Gulf of Oman, when the cargo was transferred.

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