Ukraine's War & Sanctions portal: what it is and what it is not

What the portal is

Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence publishes War & Sanctions, a public database of entities it associates with the Russian war effort. One section catalogues shadow-fleet vessels, and it is the largest public catalogue of its kind: substantially more hulls than any single sanctions list carries.

Each record names a vessel and gives an IMO number, alongside narrative material about the trade, the operators and the connections the service has identified.

It is a serious piece of open publishing by a state that has more reason than most to be watching this trade closely, and it frequently names vessels well before any G7 authority designates them.

What it is not

It is not a sanctions list, and the distinction is not pedantic.

A designation is made under a named legal instrument, on a stated date, by an authority with power to make it. It creates prohibitions binding on identified persons. It can normally be challenged, and there is a procedure for removal. Everything about it is designed to be legally operative and legally testable.

A catalogue is an analytical product. It records what a service believes. It creates no prohibition, gives rise to no offence, and has no removal procedure a shipowner can invoke. Ukraine does impose its own sanctions, by presidential decree on the basis of national security council decisions, but those are separate instruments from this portal.

Treating the two as equivalent produces two specific errors: overstating how many vessels are “sanctioned”, and telling a shipowner they are under a legal measure that does not exist.

How this site handles it

Three rules, all visible on the pages.

Its own badge. Ukraine appears with a distinct badge marked as a catalogue rather than a legal designation, and the authority page says so at the top.

Never in the counts. Every “sanctioned by” figure on this site, on vessel pages, the statistics page and the home page, excludes the Ukrainian catalogue. A hull catalogued by Ukraine and listed by nobody else shows a status of catalogued but not legally designated, with a banner saying exactly that.

Identifiers only. This site takes the vessel name, the IMO number and a link back to the portal’s own record. The narrative stays on the portal. That is partly editorial, because restating another organisation’s analysis as though it were our record would blur exactly the line this article is about, and partly a matter of respecting the portal’s stated terms for reuse.

Why a catalogue is still worth having

Because a designation is a lagging indicator.

Authorities designate after an internal process that takes months and has to survive legal review. A catalogue can name a vessel as soon as an analyst is convinced. The gap between the two is where the interesting questions live: which catalogued vessels were later designated, by whom, and how long did it take?

Because the catalogue is loaded here as a separate authority with its own records, that comparison is available directly from the data. The overlap between the catalogue and each legal list is a measurable quantity, and it says something about how different states weigh the same evidence.

How to cite it

If you are writing about a vessel that appears only in the Ukrainian catalogue, the accurate formulation is that Ukraine’s military intelligence has catalogued the ship as associated with sanctioned trades, and that no sanctions authority has designated it. That is a real and publishable fact.

What you cannot write is that the vessel is sanctioned, or under an embargo, or blacklisted in any legal sense. That is the error this article exists to prevent, and it is common enough in coverage of this subject to be worth stating twice.