Who uses the shadow fleet: Russia, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea

Four trades, not one fleet

The phrase “shadow fleet” flattens four distinct commercial systems into one. They share techniques, and occasionally ships, but the cargoes, routes, buyers and legal instruments differ enough that treating them as a single fleet produces bad analysis.

Russia

The largest by volume, and the newest. Before 2022 Russian crude and products moved on ordinary tonnage with ordinary insurance, much of it into Europe over short sea routes. The price cap and the EU import bans changed both the destination and the service arrangements: cargoes now travel much further, to buyers in Asia, and a large share of them travel outside the coalition services system.

The instruments differ by authority. The United States designates owners, operators and vessels under the Russia programs, most often Executive Order 14024. The EU adds hulls to Annex XLII of Regulation 833/2014, a port and services ban. The UK specifies ships under the Russia regulations, with a published statement of reasons that usually says plainly that the vessel carried Russian-origin oil to a third country.

The characteristic pattern in the data is an ageing Aframax or Suezmax, bought after 2022, owned by a single-ship company in a small jurisdiction, managed by a company that changed shortly after designation, and reflagged at least once.

Iran

The oldest continuous case. US measures against Iranian oil exports and the state shipping and tanker companies have run, with a pause around the 2015 nuclear agreement and its later collapse, since the 2010s. Several vessels in this database were first designated more than a decade ago and are still listed.

Two things distinguish the Iranian trade. First, its evasion practices are mature: ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf and off Malaysia, transponder gaps, blending and re-documentation of cargo origin, all of them described in the 2020 US global advisory long before the Russian trade existed in its current form. Second, the relevant legal instruments are almost entirely American, which means Iranian-linked hulls are frequently listed by OFAC alone. That shows up clearly in this database as a large population of US-only listings.

Venezuela

Venezuelan heavy crude has moved under US sanctions since 2019, primarily through designations connected to the state oil company and its counterparties. The trade is smaller than the Russian or Iranian ones and geographically concentrated in the Caribbean and the Atlantic.

The listing pattern differs too. Rather than long lists of hulls, the Venezuela programs more often reach vessels through the ownership chain, designating companies and identifying their ships as blocked property. US policy toward Venezuela has also swung more than the others, producing periods of licensing and of removals, which is one reason delistings appear in these programs.

North Korea

The smallest in volume and the most legally distinctive, because it rests on United Nations Security Council resolutions rather than on any one state’s foreign policy. The 1718 Committee designates vessels, and members implement those designations domestically. That is why some UK ship entries record their designation source as the UN rather than the UK.

The cargoes are coal and refined petroleum products, and the signature practice is the ship-to-ship transfer, often in the Yellow Sea or the East China Sea, that moves a cargo between a designated vessel and one that is not. Vessels designated under these resolutions can be barred from ports worldwide, which is a broader reach than any unilateral port ban.

What is genuinely shared

Across all four, the same techniques recur: opaque ownership through single-ship companies, frequent changes of name and flag, transfers at sea to break the documentary link between cargo and origin, gaps in transponder coverage in sensitive areas, and insurance whose ability to meet a serious claim is unclear.

They recur because they solve the same problem: separating a cargo from its origin and a hull from its owner, in a system that identifies both by paper.

Reading the split in the data

The statistics page breaks the listed population down by authority and program, and the directory filters by both. The proportion of hulls listed by only one authority is the number worth watching: it is the practical measure of how differently these four trades are treated by the three main regimes.