Few of the oil tankers that serve in Russia’s shadow fleet are dedicated to just delivering Russian oil to customers and the handful of oil spills that have happened in the last decade have involved ships much younger than those Russia prefers to use, Sergey Vakulenko, an independent energy analyst and consultant to a number of Russian and international global oil and gas companies, says in a paper for Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

At the end of 2022, Ukraine’s allies established a price cap regime for Russian crude exports, aimed at limiting and controlling Russian revenues. As bne IntelliNews reports, the oil sanctions failed. Not a single barrel of Russian crude oil has been sold below the oil price cap of $60.

Russia defied the price cap by sourcing tankers and auxiliary services outside of the Western coalition to serve in its so-called shadow fleet, but Vakulenko says that few of these tankers are permanent members of the Russian fleet. Russia is simply tapping into a global tanking business and a quarter of the circa 3,000-strong global fleet of oil tankers has picked up at least one cargo in Russia in the last year. These vessels carried an average of 48mn barrels per day (bpd) of oil with the rest sent via pipelines to the refineries.

The fact that Russia uses a high proportion of regular freelancing tankers complicates the process of sanctioning them. In December Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) introduced new smart sanctions, a change of tack from sanctions product groups to sanctioning specific banks and companies that are working with Russia to dodge sanctions. The new approach has been much more effective and the banking strangulation sanctions in particular have caused major payment headaches for the Kremlin and cut is trade turnover about 30% YTD year on year and the ruble has lost about 40% of its value, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

In addition, over 40 tankers from the shadow fleet were sanctioned and effectively taken out of service – although it is believed that most of them have been renamed and reregistered and are back in service.

However, thanks to the freelancing, sanctioning all 400 tankers believed to be working for Russia would also significantly cut into the transport of non-Russian, non-sanctioned oil, causing prices to spike. Sanctions on Russia’s shadow fleet are then by default limited to the much smaller number of tankers fully owned by the state-owned shipping company Sovkomflot. 

Some of this oil is still carried by vessels owned by shipowners and/or insured by insurers subject to the price cap coalition legislation, but they simply lie on the paperwork by massaging the costs to keep the nominal price of oil under $60 when in reality it is sold at higher market prices.

Much has been written about the age of Russia’s shadow fleet, with many vessels older than their 20-year useful life, and they have argued that this presents a high risk of accidents and major oil spills. However, Vakulenko argues that the historical data on spills does not bear that assumption out. Moreover, the same data shows that the average page of ships is higher than generally assumed.

“In 2024 there were 250 large cruise ships (those with gross tonnage of more than 50,000 tonnes). The smallest of these ships are 220 metres long by 30 metres wide, which is similar to the ubiquitous Panamax tankers, while the largest are comparable in size to Suezmax tankers,” says Vakulenko. “This histogram suggests that twenty is in fact more akin to middle age for a cruise ship than a mandatory retirement age. Since tankers are much simpler vessels than cruise ships, it is hard to identify a factor that would cause their accelerated degradation.”

Age distribution of the large cruise ships fleet

The industry body that monitors tanker safety, ITOPF, has compiled statistics on oil spills of all sizes going back to the 1970s. The number of oil spills from tankers larger than seven tonnes has not exceeded single digits per annum for the last fifteen years, according to ITOPF.

Since 2000, there have been only three major oil spills and 55 minor spills (classified as those over 5,000 barrels). “Ironically, the tankers involved in the last two major accidents – Hebei Spirit and Sanchi – were fourteen and ten years old: relatively young by the metrics for the tanker fleet,” says Vakulenko.

“The safety record shows that despite the presence of many older vessels in the global tanker fleet, the number and volume of oil spills in the last decade and a half has been extremely low, so the age of the tankers – at least within the observable window of under thirty years old – has little influence on the probability and gravity of the accidents,” Vakulenko adds.

Nevertheless, Russia does make more use of older tankers as shipping companies take advantage of Russia’s sanctions headache to price gouge, renting significantly older tankers to Russia at a significant premium. Indeed, this is a general trend, and it is Iran that uses the very oldest tankers most heavily. Iran does not use any tankers younger than ten years old, and its two largest cohorts are twenty-two and twenty-four years old, while Russia’s vessels are mostly under twenty years old.

Age of tankers carrying Russian vs non-Russian crude

Age of fleet leaving selected countries

Nevertheless, the Russian fleet is on average three to four years older than the fleets that serve the two Arab countries of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) – not a drastic difference. And these are not tankers dedicated to Russia’s use, says Vakulenko. Hardly any ships engaged in the international transportation of crude oil dedicate all of their capacity to the sanctioned countries of Russia, Iran or Venezuela, either jointly as a group of countries or separately. They are almost all part of the general pool of tankers available to everyone.

“Much of these countries’ crude transportation business is handled by ships that work for them part-time or only occasionally. For the most part, this fleet is just a subset of the global tanker fleet: the “shadow fleet” designation is not very distinctive,” says Vakulenko. “Very few tankers served Russia exclusively, and most of them picked up cargoes in both Russian and non-Russian ports. A quarter of the global tanker fleet picked up at least one cargo in Russian ports.”

Western supporters of Ukraine have called for stricter sanctions on Russian tankers and highlighted the environmental danger posed by relying on tankers with a past-sale date on their working lives. The straits of Denmark have been in particular focus as the largest part of Russian oil exports have to pass through the narrow channel, which is one of several global chokepoints. At the same time, there is substantial tanker traffic carrying non-Russian oil in the reverse direction, serving refineries in Finland, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany via Gdansk.

“The Russian fleet is certainly older than that serving EU refineries, but there is also a surprising number of vessels aged about twenty years old that are delivering non-Russian oil to the countries on the Baltic Sea, while at the same time there is a noticeable number of younger ships in the Russian fleet. Half of all the vessels delivering non-Russian crude to Baltic refineries are nine years old or younger, while 15% are seventeen years old or older,” says Vakulenko.

Comparison of the two Baltic tanker fleets