On September 8, CEPA's Europe's Edge published The Quiet Battle Against Russia's Shadow Fleet by Mitchell Polman, a public-diplomacy and international-politics specialist who is also a Research Analyst here at The Dekleptocracy Project. Ukraine's drone and naval strikes on Black Sea shipping make the headlines. The campaign Mitchell documents is quieter: ally by ally, registry by registry, Western diplomats are persuading flag-of-convenience states to strike sanctioned Russian tankers from their books. What follows is our summary of his argument — the full piece, with the primary documents linked, is at CEPA.
Why a flag is worth money
A tanker flying a false flag can sell sanctioned Russian crude at the market rate, and everyone who touches the deal — the trader, the insurer, the parts supplier — can claim they had no idea whose oil it was. Strip that flag away and the ship must sail as what it is: Russian. A Russian-flagged tanker cannot pretend its cargo is anything else, so the international price cap on Russian oil applies and the Kremlin's margin shrinks. In our terms, the flag is the laundering layer. Remove it, and the cargo has to travel under its true name.
Flags of convenience are an old business — Liberia and Panama built registry revenue on no-questions flagging decades ago — and the system is full of loopholes. A ship can trade for 90 days under a “temporary” flag while the UN's International Maritime Organization verifies its papers, then swap flags again before the check completes. The IMO published its first-ever ship registry guidelines in April, but they are voluntary, and a US Federal Maritime Commission investigation into flags of convenience, open since May 2025, has yet to report. Ukraine does not have that kind of time, which is why the real work is happening through diplomatic pressure, registry by registry.
The scoreboard so far
The tally Mitchell assembles is worth reading in full. The European Union has sanctioned 632 shadow-fleet vessels and persuaded Cameroon to remove 55 sanctioned tankers from its registry — roughly 150 remain listed there, some of which Cameroonian officials say are outright fraudulent registrations run by criminals in Turkey, Georgia, and Montenegro using pirated signature software. Comoros, Gambia, and Palau have deregistered vessels. Italian and French naval forces have boarded tankers to verify their flags, and on September 1 Germany announced it would squeeze the fleet harder after a Russian drone incident at Leipzig airport.
The holdouts are just as instructive. Equatorial Guinea still flags 44 shadow-fleet vessels even after hiring Lloyd's to modernize its registry, and Sierra Leone flags 98 — both through outsourced registry operators their governments barely supervised. That is the pattern our own research keeps finding in Russia's supply chains: the vulnerability is rarely a secret, it is an intermediary nobody was watching.
Why this is our kind of fight
This campaign is enforcement leverage of exactly the kind The Dekleptocracy Project exists to map. Russia's dependence on other people's ships, flags, insurance, and paperwork is a chokepoint — the same one we examined when Putin moved Nikolai Patrushev to the Maritime Collegium to rescue a shipbuilding industry that cannot supply its own export fleet. And the pressure points are ordinary trade math. Cameroon and Sierra Leone earn far more from their trade agreements with the EU and UK than any flag registry fee is worth, which means compliance is cheaper than defiance the moment someone makes the choice explicit.
Mitchell's prescription follows from the evidence: hand every flag state the documentation it needs to deregister sanctioned ships, apply pressure to the holdouts, and make bankers and insurers actually verify the paperwork in front of them — until, as he puts it, “every single shadow fleet vessel is flying a Russian flag” or has gone to the scrapyard. Every flag stripped moves a tanker from the shadows into the price cap. That is leverage without a shot fired.
Read the full article at CEPA. Europe's Edge is CEPA's online journal covering the foreign-policy docket across Europe and North America, and the analysis above is Mitchell's — the credit belongs to him and to CEPA for publishing it.