Eamon Dyas
What has become known in the western media as Russia’s “Shadow Fleet” is now so interwoven with myth and conjecture that it has long become another projection of Russian abhorrent behaviour amongst the recipients of Western propaganda. The term “Shadow Fleet” is a clever construction designed to conjure up the image of a fleet of rusting hulks captained by zombie-like creatures sailing their vessels in a reckless and dangerous manner with no regard to international maritime laws or practices.
We are told that the tankers which make up the Russian “Shadow Fleet” constitute a danger to international shipping, maritime ecology and national security and that it is necessary for western countries to do all they can to ensure that this threat is removed from the world’s oceans. The obvious way that this could be done is, of course, for these western countries, which constitute the strongest navies, to implement a blockade of Russia and by so doing prevent these tankers from leaving port. However, such a course of action would constitute a declaration of war with Russia and that is something that western countries are eager to avoid for the simple reason that such a declaration would place their own resources in the direct firing line of Russian retaliation. Instead, as has been the case with the West’s policy towards Russia in the context of Ukraine, western governments have chosen an asymmetric approach where they can ensure maximum damage to Russia with as little effect on their own resources as possible. When it comes to Ukraine this is being achieved by providing the Ukrainian government with as much weapons and logistical support as is necessary to ensure that Kiev continues to fight Russia for as long as possible while never directly committing itself militarily to the fray. This has created an unprecedented situation where the battlefield and economic conditions which would normally compel a belligerent to sue for peace have been removed as a determining outcome of the Ukrainian situation. Instead, Kiev has been placed in the abnormal situation where it has been led to believe that its backers will continue to supply the means by which it can not only resist its adversary but to defeat it despite all the evidence to the contrary.
That is how the West has managed to sustain what in effect is its land war against Russia in Ukraine. When it comes to the economic war it has adopted an approach which initially relied on sanctions. Such was its belief in its capacity to dictate to the rest of the world through sheer economic might that its use of economic sanctions was believed to be sufficient to ensure the outcome it desired in terms of fatally hampering Russian trade with the rest of the world. Because this proved to have been a mistaken assumption the West has been compelled to adopt a more dangerous and more direct approach. This is where the idea of the Russian “Shadow Fleet” has come to dominate the media.
In depicting the “Shadow Fleet” as the equivalent of a reckless and unpredictable user of the world’s maritime trade routes the media has succeeded in creating a physical manifestation of a Russian enemy that can be easily understood by western electorates who do not face that enemy on its land borders. It is no coincidence that the issues like cable damage and environmental threat came to dominate the media after the failure of sanctions had become obvious. The fact that damage to undersea cables by tankers has long been a common feature of maritime trade was conveniently ignored as the media sought to invest such incidents as the abnormal outcomes of Russian recklessness or/and deliberate sabotage.
However, in order to justify current and, more importantly, future actions against this “Shadow Fleet” it has become necessary to define it in terms which appeared to make such actions inevitable. In other words, it was necessary to position it as something that existed beyond the West’s “rules-based order” and when it comes to maritime trade the West’s “rules-based order” is essentially what the City of London deems it to be. It is here that the issue of insurance comes into play.
The City of London and its international partners have decided that the fleet which carries Russian oil is uninsurable and therefore the tankers that are part of that fleet do not have the right to traverse the world’s maritime trade routes. This decision has been justified largely on the basis of the age of the fleet in question with the cut-off age being arbitrarily set at 20-year old tankers. Thus, a tanker carrying Russian oil or LNG that goes beyond this 20-year limit passes the line which divides the insurable from the uninsurable irrespective of the condition of that tanker and irrespective of the fact that a tanker may have recently been refurbished in a Chinese or a Russian ship yard.
But what is the truth behind this 20-year limit? The truth is that ageing tankers have always been a significant component of the world’s shipping fleet. Before the statistics were weaponised to justify the West’s illegal constraints on Russia’s oil trade, it was projected in 2021 – based on the actual age of shipping tankers at that time – that by 2023 over a quarter of the world’s oil tankers would be over 20 years old. In other words, two years ago one in four of the tankers operating in international waters were over 20 years old. These figures are taken from the issue of the specialist trade publication “Offshore Energy” of 27 April 2021:
If that was the projection by 2023 by 2025 it can safely be assumed that the figure for tankers over 20 years old is now even higher. But rather than admit the fact that this component of the world’s tanker capacity is by no means anything unusual, since the realisation of the failure of western sanctions, the presence of tankers over 20 years old has been depicted as some kind of aberration amongst the world’s tanker resources. The truth is, there is no reason why a 20-year old tanker is no longer capable of safely transporting its oil cargo to its destination any more than a passenger-carrying aircraft of the same vintage is incapable of transporting its passengers to their destination. (In fact one in five of the world’s passenger-carrying aircraft is over 20 years old and some fleets, notably those licensed in Saudi Arabia and India, even have aircraft which are 25-30 years old).
But admitting the normality of 20+-year old tankers on the high seas would not suit the hostile intentions of NATO countries and so the idea of a 20-year old tanker being intrinsically unseaworthy has been used to justify the blanket denial of insurance by the City of London and other western insurance companies to these vessels. But not all vessels of such age are treated this way and denied such insurance. Only those carrying Russian oil and LNG are being subject to the denial and in fact initially there was nothing to stop the same tanker being denied insurance for carrying Russian oil but then being granted insurance when it is carrying US oil. Since then however, any tanker, from whatever part of the world, that dares to carry Russian oil now finds itself permanently sanctioned even if it is subsequently contracted to another country to carry a different cargo. And, though it is never admitted in the media, some of the tankers carrying Russian oil and gas are very modern with some traversing the arctic route being less than two years old. Yet even they are denied the insurance facilities by the West.
In essence what all this amounts to is the deliberate construction of a narrative surrounding the Russian “Shadow Fleet” that is designed to conceal the current efforts of western countries to illegally blockade Russian trade by pretending that is has something to do with the failure of Russian-oil-carrying tankers to meet the requirements of western insurance companies. But it is also incorrect to claim that because these tankers are not insured by western insurance companies that they remain uninsured. In fact these tankers do sail under maritime insurance. That insurance has the backing of the Russian state in much the same way in which the Swedish state insured its shipping during the First World War after the US and UK denied neutral Sweden access to its insurance facilities because it continued to insist on its right as a neutral to trade with both belligerents at a time when the US and UK were attempting to prevent it trading with Germany.
Alongside the deprivation of western insurance to the carriers of Russian oil and LNG we are also witnessing the emergence of arguments in which environment as well as national security are being used as a further layer of justification for NATO actions. We see Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, the UK and more recently Norway introducing measures aimed at hampering the transit of tankers carrying Russian oil in international waters in the Baltic Sea – the main transit route of Russian oil exports. Part of these measures consist of attempting to redefine the nature of Exclusive Economic Zones when it comes to justifying naval actions against Russian oil tankers. Such a redefinition of the EEZs involves a clouding of the distinction between a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone and its territorial waters in a way which would make it acceptable for a country to assert a right to police and monitor the status of any cargo ship traversing its EEZ in much the same way in which it has the right over a cargo ship traversing its territorial waters.
Ireland joins the ruse
It now looks like there are moves in Ireland to accommodate NATO’s ongoing strategy of preventing the transit of Russian oil and LNG-carrying tankers. An RTE ‘news’ report that it posted on Facebook in late July highlighted the “threat” to Ireland from the presence of the Russian “Shadow Fleet”. In the original report as posted on Facebook this threat was woven into a context which deceitfully conflated Ireland’s Exclusive Economic Zone with Irish Territorial Waters. Such was the blatant distortion of this report that I posted the response below. Referring to this distortion I said that it was:
“an example of where news moves to propaganda. The claim that a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone is part of its territorial waters is totally wrong. Anyone can verify this fact by simply Googling the question “Is a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone part of its territorial waters?” I did that and got the following result:
“No, an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is not part of a country’s territorial waters. The EEZ is an area adjacent to and beyond the territorial sea, where a coastal state has specific sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring, exploiting, conserving, and managing natural resources, both living and non-living. Territorial waters, on the other hand, extend up to 12 nautical miles from the coast and grant a country full sovereignty, similar to its land territory.”
I went on to ask: “So why does this supposedly well-informed RTE journalist make this false claim? Could it be because it is part of the campaign to crank up the anti-Russian sentiment in the country in order to make the case for abandoning our neutrality?” A day after I posted that response I noticed that the video report had been edited to delete that claim and modified it accordingly.
(https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1DZzDsTBMV/?mibextid=wwXIfr)
The re-vamped piece now states the following:
“Let me tell you about Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ that passes through Irish waters. These vessels are old and use decrepit practices to sell Russian oil above a price cap. Now those sanctions were imposed by western countries following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and they tried to choke Russia’s war chest. Experts say they have questionable or no insurance. It’s like having a car on the road with no NCT. There is a warning that their continued transit poses an environmental and security risk. Nobody wants an oil spill. Figures from the maritime AI organisation Windward show that 245 ‘Shadow Fleet’ vessels passed through Ireland’s Exclusive Economic Zone so far this year more than 450 times. 72 of those vessels were on sanctions lists. Their transit is legal and intervention is a complex issue for agencies across Europe, including the Irish Defence Forces, who have a recruitment and retention problem. Now, the government is trying to boost Ireland’s capability with new radar and sonar, but as long as the shadow fleet continues to transit those environmental and security risks persist.”
The edited section is quite obvious. It begins just prior to the journalist admitting that Russian tankers travelling through the Irish Exclusive Economic Zone is quite legal whereas in the original video report the very clear message was that Russian vessels traversing Ireland’s Exclusive Economic Zone was tantamount to those vessels traversing Ireland’s territorial waters which most certainly is not the case. It would seem that the report was edited in response to the fact that this claim was unsustainable. Also, the report uses the figures supplied by a private US company called Windward, which it duly credits but it fails to reveal that one of this company’s main clients is the US Government. Its website has one section with the heading: “Awareness to Action: Next-Gen. AI for U.S. Federal Maritime Missions” and goes on to say: “Windward is the leading Maritime AI company, delivering mission-critical intelligence to U.S. government agencies.”
These sins of distortion and omission on the part of RTE would appear to indicate a predisposition on the part of the country’s national broadcaster to fall into line with NATO’s strategy for dealing with what it never ceases to describe as the “Russian threat”. But this is only the culmination of a process that began even before what is described as “Russia’s full-scale invasion” of Ukraine in late February 2022. We can see this as a clear line of evolution as personified by Keir Giles. Given that he is the author of several books on the “Russian threat” to Europe as well as NATO’s “Handbook of Russian Information Warfare” which was published by the NATO Defence College in 2016 there is surprisingly little personal information about this man that is publicly available. It appears that at one time he was in the RAF and even worked as a stand-up comedian and actor for a while – a profession he shares with the president of Ukraine. He is currently a senior consultant with the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House (a body with notorious connections to British intelligence). Over the past ten years or so he has been elevated to the position of the Western media’s “go-to” voice whenever the Russian frighteners need to be applied to the electorates of western democracies.
In this capacity he has given his attention to Ireland even before the current crisis between NATO and Russia. On 22 January 2022 (a month before Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine) he had a article published in The Guardian. In this article he pushes what has since become the usual “explanation” of Putin’s ambitions which are claimed to extend beyond Ukraine and in this context he includes the likes of Finland, Sweden and even Ireland when he says:
“Finland is a hard target [for Russia – ED]. Sweden has demonstrated its readiness. And Ireland, recently the target of unwelcome Russian attention, is anticipating Russian naval exercises in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) at the beginning of February – Irish parliamentarians have pointed to the sensitive location for the live-fire drills, saying Russia deliberately chose it for the proximity to shipping lanes, flight paths, and subsea cables.” (“Has the West Fallen for Putin’s Tricks in Ukraine”, by Keir Giles, The Guardian , 22 February 2022).
Of course, as everyone now knows, that Irish situation, described by Keir Giles in such colourful terms, was quickly dissipated by the common sense approach of Irish fishermen who, after expressing their opposition to the Russian Navy’s intended naval exercises, were invited to a consultation with the Russian ambassador to Ireland, Yury Filatov, with the result that the exercises were moved to facilitate the Irish fishermen’s access to their fishing grounds. In fact, Brendan Byrne, chief executive of the Irish Fish Processing and Exporters’ Association even said he was “impressed by how well briefed the Russian ambassador had been, and said the fishermen had been better treated by the Russians than by their own government”. (See: “Irish Fishermen reach agreement with Russian ambassador over naval exercises”, by Stephen Murphy, Sky News, 27 January 2022). No doubt the Irish government at the time was more concerned to prove its anti-Russian credentials to its western allies then find a practical solution to the problem in cooperation with the Russian ambassador.
Unfortunately the actions of the Irish fishermen at that time were not something that the Irish government was willing to emulate in its ongoing relationship with Russian diplomacy. Instead, it chose to follow the diplomatically bankrupt approach of the EU and UK as these countries head inexorably towards ever-further conflict escalation with Russia – an approach that has very definite implications for the traditional neutrality that historically defined the Irish state up to now. Unsurprisingly, the same Keir Giles who wrote of the Russian threat to Ireland in 2022 has recently been given a direct voice by the Irish national broadcaster in an extended interview on “Morning Ireland” on 14 August. The interview, which was conducted uncritically and unquestioningly, provided no room for the emergence of an Irish voice on the Russo-Ukraine conflict that would be consistent with traditional Irish neutrality. Rather, it was predicated on the assumption that Ireland has no other option than to fall in behind the war-mongering voices in Europe and it is in that context that RTE now seems to see its function.
Irish Political Review 