Swedish authorities on Friday boarded an oil tanker on the EU sanctions list off the country’s southern coast after detecting a possible oil spill.
Authorities began tracking the Flora 1, a vessel flying the Cameroonian flag, after detecting a 12-kilometer-long oil slick east of the island of Gotland in the central Baltic Sea on Thursday morning. After escorting the ship to the Swedish port of Ystad, police and coast guard officers boarded the ship for inspection Friday as part of a preliminary investigation into suspected environmental crimes.
According to Vesselfinder, the oil tanker departed the Russian port of Ust-Luga on March 27 and claimed to be headed to the Brazilian port of Santos. But a spokesperson for the coast guard told POLITICO that they had received contradictory information about the ship’s destination.
Swedish authorities suspect the vessel may be part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, a covert network of mostly aging oil tankers used to circumvent sanctions imposed after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. In a post on the social media site X, Civil Defense Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said the “older, inadequately insured tankers that circumvent sanctions pose a significant security and environmental threat” to the country.
