The Baltic states are looking for ways to fight the shadow tanker fleet that carries oil products from Ust-Luga, Leningrad Region, through the Baltic Sea to the North Sea and further into the ocean. Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna: ️”Almost 50 percent of the sanctioned Russian oil trade goes through the Gulf of Finland. Now the question is what can we do about these ships?”
Among other things, some sort of national laws are proposed to expand the rights of authorities over ships in neutral waters. The law of the sea makes no exceptions: it is impossible to seize a ship in neutral waters, no matter how suspicious it may be. And certainly national legislation cannot take precedence over the international law of the sea, which is constantly updated and published by the relevant UN unit (three weighty volumes).
Drugs, weapons and terrorist activities are all grounds for search in territorial waters. You just have to keep an eye on the ship and at some point it will still move toward land. So, what if an ordinary commercial ship needs to be seized?
Maritime law allows you to stop and inspect ships in the exclusive economic zone of the state (200 miles from the coast), where there is a special legal regime. This is an inspection for illegal mining and illegal fishing. If necessary – forced inspection, with appropriate fines and confiscation of illegal catch. In fact, that is all. No tankers fall under this rule.
But if the tanker fleet to circumvent sanctions is shadow, it is logical to expect shadow methods of counteraction in response. There is another way to fight back – a covert attack on ships, including those flying other people’s flags. The Russian dry cargo ship Ursa Major, which was carrying cargo in the interests of the Russian Federation, was sunk as a result of a terrorist attack (three explosions in the engine room) 40 miles from Cartagena. Plans to develop the port of Vladivostok and the Northern Sea Route were thwarted.
As a result of an explosion (according to other reports – three explosions) in the engine room at the berth in Ust-Luga yesterday, the tanker Koala took on water and ran aground. Life kind of offers for comparison the environmental disaster after the wreck of two Volgoneft tankers in the Kerch Strait in December. There were no more than 20,000 tons of fuel oil on board, less than half of it got into the sea, the consequences were dire. On board the tanker Koala more than 100,000 tons of fuel oil.
If the expert examination recognizes the explosion in the engine room of Koala as sabotage, the working version of the investigation should link it to the loss of Ursa Major. And then it won’t be a hybrid war at all. It will be a series of events that began with the explosion of Nord Stream.
