The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank. She was owned by a Chinaman, chartered by an Arab, and commanded by a sort of renegade New South Wales German who, apparently on the strength of Bismarck’s victorious policy, brutalized all those he was not afraid of, and wore a “blood-and-iron air” … After she had been painted outside and whitewashed inside, eight hundred pilgrims (more or less) were driven on board of her as she lay with steam up alongside a wooden jetty.
Replace Bismarck with Putin and oil with missionaries, and this passage from Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim could almost have been written about Russia’s mysterious shadow fleet. The puzzling question of why Western sanctions have failed to cripple the Russian economy almost three years after the invasion of Ukraine finds an answer far out to sea in a convoy of clinkered, clapped-out hulks. One such vessel, Eagle S, was seized by Finnish authorities last week, who are investigating whether the ship was involved in severing an undersea power cable. Their inquiries may reveal that these vessels are now being used to actively sabotage European infrastructure. But the Eagle S is part of a much larger network, one that has kept the money flowing for the Kremlin’s war effort for years now – all while posing a grave threat to the environment and human life.
The life expectancy of an oil tanker is 15 years. For actuarial purposes, it’s written off after that. But Moscow has turned to creaking, rusty vessels, some of them twice as old, to deliver its supplies of crude oil, its key national export, to willing buyers including China, India and Turkey. The fuel is sold above the price cap of $60 which was imposed by Washington and its allies in order to choke off the revenue at Putin’s disposal. The sanctioning countries chose to let Russia continue trading to avoid a global oil shortage and an accompanying price hike. This black moonshine lubricates the black economy, selling below the international market rate, which touched $80 a barrel in October. The beggars in the Kremlin can’t be choosers, not that they could care less: this trade has put billions into their war chest.
An oil tanker is one of the biggest man-made structures on Earth – and getting bigger. Maritime architecture has supersized in inverse proportion to the construction permitted in many places on dry land, which is increasingly cramped and constrained. Can’t get permission for your high-rise hotel? No problem, just build it at sea: a buxom cruise liner that can accommodate as many holidaymakers as an entire resort. The largest oil tankers at sea today have a capacity of 550,000 DWT (dead weight tonnage), or half a million tons fully loaded. As big as these leviathans are, the sea is infinitely bigger and growing all the time as water levels rise. It’s vast, impenetrable and hostile. As Conrad’s stories remind us, few environments are capable of bringing out the good and bad in people like the sea. Incalculable tracts of it are beyond the law, where the writ of nation states carries no weight, and are subject only to the niceties of conventions which rogue operators don’t always observe. The world has no maritime police force, and charterers and crews have taken advantage of that for almost as long as there has been shipping. But Putin has weaponised it as never before.
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