French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday that an oil tanker immobilized off the French Atlantic coast had committed “very serious wrongdoings” and linked it to Russia’s shadow fleet, which is avoiding Western sanctions over Moscow’s war in Ukraine.
The tanker was sailing last week off the coast of Denmark and was cited by European naval experts as possibly being involved in drone flights over the country.
French naval forces forcibly boarded the ship a few days ago at the request of prosecutors who suspected wrongdoing, a military official said Wednesday. The prosecutor’s office in the western French city of Brest said a judicial investigation has been opened into the crew’s “refusal to cooperate” and “failure to justify the nationality of the vessel.”
The ship was ordered to stay in place pending further investigation, the military official said. French naval forces boarded the ship again Wednesday to provide food and fuel to the crew aboard, according to the official, who was not authorized to be publicly named discussing an ongoing investigation.
The ship left the Russian oil terminal in Primorsk near Saint Petersburg on Sept. 20, sailed off the coast of Denmark and has stayed off the coast of the French western port of Saint-Nazaire since Sunday, according to the Marine Traffic monitoring website.
Macron suggested it was stopped by French authorities’ “intervention,” saying: “I think it’s a good thing that this work has been done and that we’ve been able to stop it.”
“There were some very serious wrongdoings made by this crew, which is why there are legal proceedings in the case,” Macron said on the sidelines of a summit of European Union leaders in Copenhagen, Denmark. He didn’t elaborate.
The Russian Embassy in Paris didn’t respond to The Associated Press’ request for comment.
Asked whether the ship was connected to drone incidents in Denmark and about reports that two people aboard had been detained, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said she wouldn’t comment on specific investigations.
But she added, “I can say in more general terms that we are facing a lot of problems with the shadow fleet. And that has been the case, especially in the Baltic Sea for quite a long time. And we are working very closely together to battle this situation.”
On Christmas Day 2024, a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker dubbed the Eagle S triggered a nationwide alarm in Finland after it was suspected of having deliberately severed a critical undersea electric cable 50 miles off the coast. A seven-month-long “60 Minutes” investigation revealed that the incident was not an isolated case, and that a major Russian oil company hid its ownership of the tanker behind layers of shell companies to evade Western sanctions.
Following the incident, NATO launched “Baltic Sentry,” deploying ships and planes to monitor the shadow fleet and safeguard critical seabed infrastructure. There have been no cable-cutting incidents since, British Adm. Keith Blount, NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander Europe, told CBS News.
But the latest incident highlights “the existence and the reality of a phenomenon that we have been describing and denouncing for a long time,” Macron said, which is the “notorious shadow fleet” that represents tens of billions of euros for Russia’s budget and finances an estimated 40% of Russia’s war effort.
The tanker known as “Pushpa” or “Boracay,” whose name has changed several times, was sailing under the flag of Benin and appears on a list of ships targeted by EU sanctions against Russia.
The shadow fleet is made up of aging tankers bought used, often by nontransparent entities with addresses in non-sanctioning countries, and sailing under flags from non-sanctioning countries. Their role is to help Russia’s oil exporters elude the price cap imposed by Ukraine’s allies.
Last month, President Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was “ready to do major Sanctions on Russia” on the condition that all NATO countries stop buying oil from Russia. After pressure from Mr. Trump, the European Union said it is considering a ban on Russian gas imports as part of a new package of sanctions.
