Russia’s "shadow fleet" and its role in providing marine logistics of Russia’s exports of crude oil and oil products
UDC: 339.182
DOI: -
Authors:
KATYUKHA PAVEL B.
1,
GOLUBCHIK ANDREI M.2,
PAK EGOR V.2
1 National University of Oil and Gas "Gubkin University", Moscow, Russia
2 MGIMO University, Moscow, Russia
Keywords: foreign economic activity, logistics of Russia’s foreign trade, Russia’s exports of crude oil and oil products, seaborne transportation, "shadow fleet", tanker fleet
Annotation:
"Shadow fleet" turns out to be one of the categories that entered the foreign-trade discourse of FEA participants due to the sanctions regime of the West imposed on Russia in 2022. In fact, it is not quite so because the real category in its time described crude oil transportation from Iran and Venezuela being under economic sanctions long before. However, in those days such a way of limitations circumvention was not of massive character and propagation as in case with Russia and the transportation volumes were objectively incomparable with the Russian ones. As of today, it should be admitted that there is no commonly accepted definition of "shadow fleet" and its exact number of tankers involved in such operations and excessive politization of oil trading practices hampers the objective assessment of the phenomenon. Thus, the authors of the article neatly position "shadow fleet" a tool of delivering Russian crude oil and oil products to the world markets in conditions of unilateral economic sanctions on the part of western countries. As a consequence, in order to avoid negative implications it is worth naming these tankers as "fleet controlled by Russian business" with all required documents and insurance at hand as well as competent crew for solving a cornerstone task on the national level – sustainable and guaranteed exports of crude oil and oil products from Russia.
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