BRUSSELS — On a chilly spring morning in March, British coast guards spotted something unusual around 100 kilometers off the Scottish shoreline: a dark stain, stretching 23 kilometers into the North Atlantic Ocean.
According to an internal analysis prepared by the coast guard’s satellite services and seen by POLITICO, the likely source of that stain was Innova, a tanker roughly the size of the Eiffel Tower that at the time was hauling 1 million barrels of sanctioned oil from Russia on its way to a refinery in India.
Yet the coast guard did little to investigate further, and the tanker — free from any repercussion — continues to trade oil today, helping fill the Kremlin’s war chest more than two years into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The Innova is just one of hundreds in the world’s so-called shadow fleet, a collection of often aging, poorly maintained ships sailing in defiance of Western sanctions — and spreading environmental harm without consequences.
