Law of the Sea comes to life in the hunt for sanctioned Russian oil

Ukraine’s Western allies are using maritime law to inspect Russian shadow tankers. Save Share Until US President Donald Trump reversed the thrust of hissanctions policyof Russian oil on Friday, Ukraine’s Western allies had been ramping up the use of international law. Countries sanctioning Russian oil have for the first time enforced boarding and inspection rights under the Law of the Sea this year, experts told Al Jazeera. “The whole idea now is to disrupt, deter and make it more expensive and costly for Russia to logistically get their oil to market on these ships, and that’s definitely happening,” said Michelle Bockmann, an analyst at maritime intelligence company Windward. She spoke to Al Jazeera on the sidelines of the49th Conferenceon Oceans Law and Policy held in Athens. Some Russian officials believe worse is to come. “Western countries are trying to organise the interception of our vessels. London and Brussels are drawing up plans to blockade the Baltic Sea and the straits leading into it. Other key shipping routes are also under threat,” Russian Maritime Board chairman Nikolai Patrushev told officials during a visit to China on October 12. Western sanctions not only ban Russian oil purchases in the sanctioning territories. They forbid Western-insured tankers from selling Russian oil to third parties except at below-market prices, which leaves Russia with little or no profit. Since sanctions were imposed in 2022, Russia has been exporting about half of its crude oil through a “shadow fleet” of tankers that are not owned or insured by Western institutions, and often do not comply with environmental and safety standards. It is the right to enforce these standards that allows the United States, United Kingdom and European Union to step up compliance inspections using Article 110 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which allows coastal states to inspect vessels. That has decreased Russia’s room for manoeuvre in its cat-and-mouse game of circumventing oil sanctions 45 months after the EU, US and other Group of Seven (G7) states imposed them. “A lot of these ships were using fraudulent registries, and they were stateless,” said Bockmann. Under UNCLOS, she said, “Instead of just hailing them, ‘Hey, what’s your flag? What’s your insurance?’ and then letting them merrily go on their way under the right of innocent passage … they now had a legal basis to board them....