French authorities on Monday confirmed the country’s Navy intercepted and seized a Russian oil tanker sailing under a false flag.
The Tagor, which departed from the Russian port of Murmansk, was boarded more than 400 nautical miles off France’s Atlantic coast on Sunday. French officials suspect the ship was flying a false flag and is part of the so-called shadow fleet of mostly aging oil tankers used to circumvent sanctions imposed after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“It is unacceptable that ships circumvent international sanctions, violate the law of the sea, and finance the war that Russia has been waging against Ukraine for over four years,” French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on the social media site X.
The operation was undertaken with the support of the United Kingdom, which recently expanded its military powers to detain Russian ships evading sanctions.
