Denmark’s foreign minister has said he is in discussions with neighbours looking at ways of barring Russia’s shadow fleet from transiting the Baltic Sea, something that has earned a rebuke from the Russian ambassador in Copenhagen.
“There is broad consensus that the shadow fleet is an international problem and that international solutions are required,” Lars Lokke Rasmussen told Reuters without going into details about what measures are being discussed.
Russia sends about a third of its seaborne oil exports through the Danish straits with around one in three of these ships having unknown insurance.
Russia’s ambassador to Denmark, Vladimir Barbin, said Denmark was wrong to try and limit free navigation.
“The threat to the safety of navigation and the marine environment in the Baltic Sea is not the tankers with Russian oil, but the sanctions that the West has imposed on Russia,” Barbin told Reuters.
The unimpeded passage of ships through Danish waters was guaranteed by the Copenhagen Treaty of 1857, which remains valid and legally binding, the ambassador said.
In recent months, littoral states along the Baltic have been upping their campaign to take action against Russia’s dark fleet of ageing tankers transiting the region.
Finland has called for the European Union to buy a vessel ready to handle oil spills in the northern part of the Baltic.
Finland’s Transport and Communications Ministry said earlier this month oil spills from older ships with weaker insurance were a real risk, especially come winter when many of the ships Russia uses to haul its exports are poorly equipped and not suited for icy conditions.
Sweden has been among the most vocal, active countries waging a diplomatic campaign to get other states to back a greater crackdown on Russia’s shadow fleet passing through the region, concerned about the potential for environmental catastrophe with a number of near disasters reported among the ageing fleet of tankers over the past year.
In the southeast of the continent, meanwhile, the Greek navy has for the past few weeks made ship-to-ship transfers impossible at one of the top European destinations for such activities. Since May 1, citing military exercises, the Greek navy has put out of bounds an area in international waters southeast of the Peloponnese islands, six nautical miles off the coast of Laconia, a patch of water that has seen Russian-linked tankers dot the horizon over the past couple of years.
As a result, Russian movers of sanctioned oil have found a new spot in the Mediterranean to carry out ship-to-ship transfers having been turfed out of Greece last month. A slice of coastline off eastern Morocco near the city of Nador has become a new location to transfer Urals oil from smaller ships to larger tankers for onward shipment.
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