Sweden alerts allies about Russian oil tankers in Baltic Sea used for spying

Russia has deployed a “shadow fleet” of oil tankers in the Baltic Sea to circumvent economic sanctions and also engage in espionage, according to a top Swedish military official.

“We are finding antennas and masts that typically do not belong to, for example, fishing vessels, so it is clear that we feel that there are sometimes other objectives associated with their activities in terms of what is moving at sea,” Royal Swedish Navy chief Ewa Skoog Haslum told Swedish media.

Haslum’s warning adds a new dimension to Sweden’s recent push for the European Union to target the vessels in a new round of sanctions. In the years since the launch of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Russia has turned to a fleet of an estimated 1,400 vessels to disguise energy exports from Western regulators, and Swedish officials see the vessels as a ballooning threat.

“We will all be affected if there were a major problem arising from a collision or oil leakage from one of these ships, which also in many cases are not seaworthy, or very close to not being seaworthy,” Swedish Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom told the Guardian in mid-April. “The fact that they are transporting oil, which fuels Russian aggression against Ukraine is bad enough. But even worse is the fact that Russia doesn’t care one bit, apparently, about the fact that these ships could cause major environmental havoc in seas, which if you take the Baltic Sea is sensitive as it is.”

Those vessels have long played an important role in sanctions evasion for rogue regimes such as North Korea, but analysts worry that they could figure into Russia’s “grey zone” aggression against NATO allies in the Baltic Sea.

“Already a risk when the fleet was relatively small and primarily serviced Iran and Venezuela, its explosive growth since early 2022 means it’s likely to cause far more extensive harm to other ships (and their owners and insurers) and to countries in whose waters it sails,” the Atlantic Council’s Elisabeth Braw wrote in January. “The shadow fleet, in fact, seems intended not just to transport goods to and from Russia but to cause harm to other countries. … Countries that don’t utilize the shadow fleet but whose waters the vessels use are the real victims of the shadow activities.”

Braw assessed that “some four dozen incidents involving suspected shadow vessels have already taken place.” Haslum, for her part, added that those incidents could give vessels that purport to be in duress an opportunity to gain access to a port.

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“What is happening now due to the sanctions against Russia could become both a security and an environmental tragedy,” she said.

Billstrom, who represents the newest member of the NATO alliance, said this week that Stockholm will press the European Union for “an import ban on liquefied natural gas as well as measures to curb the Russian shadow fleet.”