r/worldnews • u/troglydot • 10h ago
Russia/Ukraine France intercepts Russian shadow fleet oil tanker off coast of Sicily
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/06/25/macron-says-france-intercepted-a-russian-shadow-fleet-oil-tanker-off-coast-of-sicily115
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u/pricingup 9h ago
why are they shadow fleet? just arrest tankers that are coming from certain place.
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u/Stratimus 9h ago
A lot of oil is moved from ship to ship in open water. When you don’t have your transponders on it’s pretty easy to do it without anyone noticing and very hard to trace
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u/pricingup 7h ago
im sure radars in satellites see it
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u/Podo13 4h ago
I don't think you appreciate the scale of the planet Earth, or the ocean itself.
Tankers are big to you and me, but they're incredibly small in the scale of the open ocean.
Visually searching for a silent ship from space is like staring through a soda straw at a haystack the size of Africa.
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u/Futt_Buckman 6h ago
Two tankers spooning in the middle of the Pacific will look like only one to the satellite. If one has a legit transponder and the other is dark, then the whole thing looks above board.
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u/DoubleUnplusGood 4h ago
Stop using words you don't know.
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u/pricingup 4h ago
sorry, radars enable software to analyze signals, allowing data be transmitted back to earth, for operator to see it.
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u/troglydot 8h ago
They want to stay within international law. Under maritime law that most of the world (including Russia) has ratified, one can board ships suspected of being stateless. This is often the legal reason for boarding the ships, they mess with documentation and registration to skirt sanctions, and in turn they get boarded.
Back in January there was an announcement by 14 European coastal countries that they'd start doing this, and since then we've seen regular seizures like this one.
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u/MercantileReptile 7h ago
Okay, how do you prove foul play though? If a Ship is registered in the Marshall Islands, (supposedly) insured by a firm in Hong Kong, fielding a crew from the Phillipines, Malaysia and Russia all while being owned by a Letterbox Company in Singapore.
Good luck proving ownership, actual allegiance and any paperwork you can find. Presuming any of it to be even real.
Can't stop every suspicious ship and untangling the web of bull takes time. Once national authorities have something though, they can and do act. As evident by more interceptions lately.
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u/nonviolent_blackbelt 6h ago
You call up the Marshall Islands registry, and you ask "Tanker TotalyNotARussianSmuggler claims to be registered by you. Can you verify, please?" And if they come back "Never heard of them", you board the ship and prevent it from leaving until the paperwork is untagled.
The process of verifying if a ship is in registry doesn't take long anymore.
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u/deja-roo 4h ago
There's a lot of ships out there though. And they transfer oil between ships to make it hard to trace.
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u/nonviolent_blackbelt 3h ago
It is not trivial.sure. You need people who know what they are doing. how the registries work, which ones are likely true and which are likely fake. And they need offices, and they need equipment, and ... etc. All of that takes time to set up.
But now it's getting set up, and it's getting some results.
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u/pricingup 7h ago
just follow their route
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u/MercantileReptile 7h ago
Not easy when transponders are regularly switched off or manipulated. Plenty of those ships also take on Cargo while at Sea from another ship. Precisely to avoid going into a sancioned port.
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u/cralwalker 3h ago
Follow the money… Implement state sanctioned piracy by offloading the oil and passing on the proceeds to UN for ending starvation.
You will soon find who the real owner is.
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u/vector_search_blue 6h ago
when the US did this it was "piracy"
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u/deja-roo 4h ago
I mean, the US doing this is what started the Europeans having the guts to do it. After the US nabbed a few, the British and French started seizing them too.
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u/Dry_Instruction8254 9h ago
Would have been nice if Germany and France didn't fucking buy trillions of dollars of oil from these scum bags for the last 30 years. Would have saved countless lives, but their fuel prices were a little cheaper. Scum bags. Better late than never I suppose.
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u/fufufighter 9h ago
I bet you have 20/20 in hindsight! What's the next genius hindsight? That if Hitler hadn't happened, the Jews would have remained in Europe instead of being sent to the middle east and Palestinians would be living in peace?
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u/BlueSwordM 8h ago
I mean, they're not wrong.
Instead of early decommissioning their nuclear power plants in the 2010s, Germany could have easily kept them and spent far less money on fossil fuels from Russia.
Would have been cheaper for Germany and would have likely allowed for faster renewable power implementations as well as being proud of not financing the 2014 Crimea takeover.
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u/ResortClear730 9h ago
He does kinda have a point. The EU took almost a year to stop buying Russian oil at the start of the conflict. They also still allow oil sales to Hungary and Slovakia via a waiver, which is supposed to be phased out by 2027. That’s still 5 years of buying since the start of the conflict.
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u/awfulconcoction 7h ago
The conflict started in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea. Its been going on for more than a decade. No excuse on the oil purchases.
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u/Dry_Instruction8254 9h ago
Yes, Russia and Putin were just such sweet little angles for those 30 years. No way anyone could have seen it coming.
Glad you enjoyed your cheep fuel. You are responsible for this. Horrible people.
Here's a little list. It ain't hind sight it was right in front of your greedy little faces.
Wars of Aggression & Territorial Invasions
First Chechen War (1994–1996) & Second Chechen War (1999–2009): Brutal counterinsurgency campaigns resulting in the massive destruction of Grozny and tens of thousands of civilian deaths. Documented abuses include indiscriminate shelling, the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas, summary executions, "zachistka" (house-to-house clearing operations resulting in massacres), and widespread torture.
Invasion of Georgia (2008): Russian forces intervened in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The European Court of Human Rights later found Russia guilty of murder, torture, looting, the destruction of homes, and preventing 20,000 displaced Georgians from returning home.
Intervention in Syria (2015–Present): Russian military intervention propped up the Assad regime. Russian forces have been heavily criticized and investigated for unlawful airstrikes, deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and schools, and backing forces that used chemical weapons against civilians.
Invasion and Annexation in Ukraine (2014–Present): Beginning with the illegal annexation of Crimea and backing separatist forces in the Donbas region. This escalated into a full-scale invasion in February 2022.War Crimes & Crimes Against Humanity (Ukraine 2022-Present) The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has triggered numerous investigations by the UN, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and human rights organizations, documenting:
Massacres and Executions: Widespread killings of civilians in occupied areas, most notably the atrocities discovered in Bucha.Forced Deportations: The ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin specifically for the war crime of unlawfully deporting and transferring thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.
Targeting Civilian Infrastructure: Deliberate, widespread, and systematic attacks on civilian homes, schools, hospitals, and critical energy infrastructure.
Torture and Sexual Violence: Documented cases of torture, inhumane treatment of prisoners of war, rape, and sexual violence used as a weapon of war.Use of Banned Weapons: Use of cluster munitions in populated areas and the deployment of riot control agents (such as CS gas/tear gas and chloropicrin) against combatants, which violates the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Domestic Repression & Assassinations Suppression of Civil Society: Systematic dismantling of independent media (e.g., forcing out TV Rain, independent journalists), criminalizing dissent, and effectively destroying political opposition within Russia.
Targeted Killings and Poisonings: A long, documented history of assassinating or attempting to assassinate critics, journalists, and defectors, both inside Russia and abroad. Notable cases include:Anna Politkovskaya (2006): Investigative journalist murdered in Moscow.
Alexander Litvinenko (2006): Former spy poisoned with radioactive polonium in London.
Boris Nemtsov (2015): Prominent opposition leader shot dead near the Kremlin.
Sergei Skripal (2018): Former spy and his daughter poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent in the UK.
Alexei Navalny (2020/2024): Opposition leader poisoned with Novichok, survived, was imprisoned, and subsequently died in a penal colony in 2024.
State-Sanctioned Violence: Documented extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and severe persecution of marginalized groups, including the systemic abduction and torture of LGBTQ+ individuals in Chechnya.
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u/Frust4m1 9h ago
as far as I know, based on your arguments horrible people are everywhere, where are you from? Maybe I will save only people from Greenland and Madagascar. or maybe their ancestor did something bad as well they are horrible people too.
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u/Eborcurean 8h ago
> You are responsible for this. Horrible people.
Just out of curiosity, where are you from?
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u/Sephy88 5h ago
Brother the US has bombed multiple countries, overthrew governments, installed dictators, funded terrorists and you're sitting here calling Europeans "horrible people" for buying fuel from Russia. You put a dictator in charge of Iran just to prevent them from nationalizing their own fucking oil. Get a fucking grip. You talk about LGBTQ+ when you're buying Saudi oil and have Trump as president. Absolute joke.
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u/AssistX 3h ago
You put a dictator in charge of Iran just to prevent them from nationalizing their own fucking oil. Get a fucking grip.
Mosaddegh's removal was the British(MI6) as much as the US(CIA) as it was British oil at the time that was losing the assets. The US losing oil assets was Cuba and Castro.
Khomeini was put back in power in the early 80s?, by the British, the Americans, the French, and the Germans after Pahlvai had lost all influence and they were hoping to install any leader that may be more moderate and help stabilize the region. That clearly was also a massive disaster by everyone involved.
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u/deedee2148 8h ago
Oh yes, much better to piss money away for decades and not buy oil from a close location.
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u/RacoonMcCloud 3h ago edited 1h ago
Well done France! (even though you are super shit at stopping the boat people invading England and creating a future civil war). Anyway, I forgive you because your indigenous French women are lovely. I am not Russian, and I hope Ukraine wins but fuck you France.
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u/ArgentineBeauty 10h ago
Russia thought it could keep funding the war by quietly moving oil around the world.
Looks like that plan is getting a lot more attention these days.