European Union naval forces have boarded a suspected Russian shadow fleet tanker in the Mediterranean and confirmed the vessel was sailing under a false flag, the EU's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas announced on Sunday, November 15.

Source: Euronews

Kallas said troops from Operation Irini, the EU's naval mission in the Mediterranean, boarded the MV Midag on Friday, November 13. The boarding was carried out under Article 110 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which allows warships to verify the flag of a vessel on the high seas when there are reasonable grounds for suspicion.

“The EU will keep disrupting Russia's shadow fleet at sea and through diplomatic means,” Kallas said in her post announcing the boarding.

The seventh such boarding

The Midag is the seventh suspected shadow fleet vessel boarded by EU forces in recent months, according to reporting on the announcement. In August, Operation Irini forces carried out a similar flag-verification boarding of the MV Sun, another oil tanker suspected of helping Russia move crude outside Western sanctions.

The “shadow fleet” is the name given to the hundreds of ageing, often opaquely owned tankers that Russia has used to keep exporting oil since Western sanctions and a price cap were imposed over its war in Ukraine. Brussels has already sanctioned more than 600 vessels suspected of belonging to the network, and EU officials say false flags, switched-off tracking and ship-to-ship transfers are the fleet's standard tools.

Sanctions vote comes Monday

The announcement lands a day before EU foreign ministers meet on Monday, when they are set to approve new Russia sanctions listings, including on banks, buyers and companies that support the shadow fleet, Kallas said. The listings would extend the bloc's campaign from listing individual ships to targeting the financial and commercial network around them.

Operation Irini was launched in March 2020 and is tasked primarily with enforcing the UN arms embargo on Libya, but its ships and aircraft also monitor maritime traffic across the central Mediterranean — the same waters through which much of the shadow fleet's oil moves toward buyers outside Europe.

Russia has not publicly responded to the Midag boarding in the reports available at the time of publication. What happens next will be decided first at Monday's foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels, and then on the water, where EU commanders say the verification boardings will continue.