The Marinera doesn't seem like an easy ship to hide. It measures 333 meters in length, equivalent to three soccer fields. It has the capacity to carry 281,000 tons, which is equal to 31 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower. That's two million barrels of oil, or 318 million liters: as much as Norway's daily crude production, and more than that of Mexico or Qatar.
And yet, it has disappeared from public tracking systems at least 20 times, in locations as remote as the Azores Islands, the Malacca Strait - the world's busiest - or the coast of Sri Lanka, right in the middle of the Earth's busiest maritime route, according to Jose Macias, a researcher at the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Additionally, it has had eight different names since it started sailing 23 years ago, including Bella-1, Timus, Neofit, Yannis, Zhiao Xu Shan, Seaways Mulan, and Overseas Mulan.
The Marinera is one of the 1,300 ships, mostly oil tankers, that make up the Russian ghost fleet dedicated to transporting crude oil from Russia - and until this year, from Venezuela and Iran - mainly to India and China. This Armada has continued to grow since Russia's invasion of Ukraine four years ago, and the fall of the Venezuelan regime and the U.S. blockade of Iran do not seem to have slowed its expansion.
One in five tankers operates in a gray area of international legality. They appear and disappear, change names, owners, flag of registration... In a world where investment funds use satellite images to know how many cars are parked in supermarket lots to predict consumption trends or the performance of a specific distribution company, giant ships are engulfed in a perpetual magic game where they appear and disappear.
Gonzalo Saiz Erausquin, an expert on the Russian ghost fleet at the London-based think tank RUSI (Royal United Services Institute), estimates that between 65% and 70% of all Russian oil exports go through the country's ghost fleet. This amounts to about 3.5 million barrels of crude oil daily, nearly as much as Iran or the UAE before the war.
This fleet that exists and ceases to exist, with insurance, traders, export certificates, and even questionable legal or digital existence in the most monitored world in history, is one of the best examples of the disintegration of the global geopolitical and trade system, and the loss of Western and, especially, European Union's global influence.
Western failure has been evident. Especially that of the EU, which, since the invasion of Ukraine, has launched - initially with the support and collaboration of the United States and several Asian powers - the largest sanctions operation in history against a major energy power, Russia. Moscow has evaded pressure by creating a massive fleet of tankers that operate under different rules than the rest of the ships sailing the oceans.
Iran, Venezuela, Libya, and North Korea were already doing it, albeit on a smaller scale. Now, Russia has given it planetary dimensions, with the help of China and India. Neither is willing to pay more for oil due to a European war. Beijing also has a declared strategic interest in Russia winning in Ukraine.
In theory, the sanctions system is simple: the West - meaning the G7, the EU, and Australia - allows Russian oil to continue circulating, but only below a maximum price. If the oil exceeds that threshold, the cargo loses access to the Western maritime ecosystem: financing, intermediaries, and logistical services. And to something crucial: Lloyd's insurance system in London. Currently, the cap is $44.10 per barrel. But Russia does not sell its oil at that price. In fact, at the worst moments of the Iran war, Russian crude reached $126.
Evasion of sanctions is not particularly difficult. For a ship to vanish electronically, all it needs to do is turn off its Automatic Identification System (AIS), which constantly reports its position, speed, name, destination, and flag, allowing ports, coast guards, insurers, shipowners, and clients to know its whereabouts. Other times, they engage in what is called spoofing: manipulating the AIS to provide a false location. In recent years, there have even been cases of tankers officially sailing on land.
Next is deceiving with prices. Although many loads are officially declared below the $44.10 cap, in practice, the actual price is much higher, but legally inflated through transportation costs, intermediaries, or parallel agreements.
This is where the traders come in. These are gigantic companies that, with the exception of the Australian Glencore, are usually based in Switzerland and not publicly traded. Their mission is to move physical barrels from one place to another. Their history is a succession of deals with shady characters - from Khomeini to Gaddafi - evading Western sanctions and, at times, doing business simultaneously with warring factions in a civil war, as has recently happened in Libya. Shell, ExxonMobil, or Total are well-known companies. But few have heard of Trafigura, Vitol, or Gunvor, despite being almost as large as the former.
The role of traders in falsifying documents about the oil traversing the seas is one of the biggest mysteries of the ghost fleet. Saiz Erausquin admits that it is difficult to know if these giants have collaborated with Russia. But he also points out that "in recent years, a large number of trading companies have emerged in areas like the Persian Gulf," where there are fewer controls than in the West for transactions with Russia.
This is how that fleet, which probably consists of more than 1,300 ships, operates. "That figure is the most accepted, but these ships provide services to multiple governments, making their identification difficult. The latest data I have seen from the maritime services provider Clarksons indicate between 1,500 and 1,700. Of these, about 700 are sanctioned," Saiz Erausquin explains in a phone conversation. In total, there are about 7,000 tankers in the world.
The ghost fleet is a kind of commercial privateer armada. Their ships are legal according to some jurisdictions - Russia, India, China, Iran - but not for others. The risk of confrontation is rising. On Monday, the EU authorized, under the legal cover of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, its warships to inspect Russian vessels suspected of transporting oil subject to sanctions. Moscow has called the measure "piracy" and has declared that it reserves the right to act accordingly.
The offensive against the ghost fleet is led by the so-called NB8++, a coalition of Nordic, Baltic, and European partner countries - with the UK among the most active - coordinating sanctions, maritime intelligence, and inspections to pursue Russian tankers, which is becoming central to Europe's efforts to combat this activity.
Spain "does not officially participate" in the NB8++, Saiz Erausquin explains. However, Spain is a key country for the ghost fleet because one of the locations where tankers transfer oil at sea is near Ceuta. With this system, the crude oil from a ship that left Russia is transferred to another ship from a different country. This way, the oil is no longer Russian and is not subject to sanctions. The operation poses a significant environmental risk, exacerbated by the age of the vessels and the lack of controls.
It is a potentially serious threat because Moscow could deploy its warships to protect the tankers. Additionally, there are unconfirmed reports indicating that some tankers carry mercenaries from the famous Russian company Wagner on board, perhaps to protect them from the increasingly frequent boardings by European countries or simply to transport these mercenaries to sub-Saharan African countries where they support various governments. To date, European countries, predominantly the Nordic ones, have seized 13 Russian ships from this fleet, including one.
But the responsibility does not only lie with Russia. An example: the EU has sanctioned 600 ships, to which it has prohibited the provision of any service. The United Kingdom has done the same with those same 600 vessels. But until last week - four years and three months after the invasion of Ukraine, which triggered these sanctions - London did not define the list of services that its companies cannot provide to those ships. As for the United States, it has only sanctioned 200 vessels. "Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the United States has only taken action against the Venezuelan and Iranian ghost fleets, but not against Russia's," explains Saiz.
The EU is also responsible. Around a quarter of the 3.5 million barrels traveling in the Russian ghost fleet are carried on tankers owned by Greek shipowners, a community well known for their ability to take risks, exert political influence, and bend the law in every possible way, heirs to the business culture of the most famous of them: Aristotle Onassis.
Greek tankers and those from other EU countries transport Russian crude as long as it is officially priced below the EU's maximum authorized price. In reality, as mentioned above, that ceiling is in most cases a mere formality. Additionally, Greek shipowners have sold at least 127 old tankers to ghost companies in countries like Dubai, Seychelles, or India, which have renamed them, registered them in countries that have no control over the conditions under which ships operate under their flag, such as Gabon, Cameroon, and increasingly, Russia.
All this creates a true ecosystem that, paradoxically, is not impossible for the EU to attack. Because the ghost fleet ultimately revolves around private companies in Russia and other countries that do not meet the solvency or safety standards set by international conventions. Acting upon them theoretically would not be impossible. Western sanctions have not destroyed Russian oil trade. They have done something more complex: creating an alternative system, less transparent, more dangerous from all points of view, and independent of the West.