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A rotating selection from the paid serviceTransatlantic sanctions lists drift apart as Washington targets Iran, Europe Russia
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On film
Built from Mariel dataBetween 5 and 15 October, nine merchant ships were hit or targeted off Romania and Bulgaria and at Izmail, Ukraine’s port on the Danube. Three sank. Nobody has claimed the attacks, but Russia is the suspected attacker.
Mariel shows what these ships had in common. Five of them, between them, were inspected 31 times in Ukrainian ports since the 2022 invasion, and not once in a Russian port. Two of the ships that sank had shared a manager in Beirut. One, the HS Dignity, was inspected on the Danube five weeks before she went down.
On the other side of the sea, Ukraine has been striking tankers that carry Russian oil. The film follows three of them, off Novorossiysk and Sochi, from August to October.
It is built from Mariel, Maritime Watch’s shadow-fleet database, and from publicly available records.
Music: Yevhen Astafiev, Turning Pages and AlexGrohl. Sound effects: Dragon Studio, David Dumais Audio, SoundReality and Freesound Community, via Pixabay.
Death on the Black Sea
Nine merchant ships hit or targeted in ten days off Romania, Bulgaria and on the Danube, and Ukraine’s strikes on tankers serving Russia, mapped ship by ship with Mariel data.
Open the film page → All films →Mariel
Mariel is our own shadow-fleet database. It follows ships, the companies behind them and the sanctions lists, ship by ship and date by date, so a single query can show what happened to a fleet before and after a listing.
A typical piece of Mariel work: an operator is sanctioned, and Mariel traces where each of its ships went next, under which new manager, at which address, and which ports they called at afterwards.
- When a ship operator is sanctioned, where do its ships go next?
- Which listed ships were still calling at European ports after the listing?
- Who managed, flagged and classed a ship before anyone listed it?
- Which companies share an office with a sanctioned one?
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The Council, Commission and Parliament papers a story rests on, attached to the article.
The archive
Searchable from 2021, tagged by topic, institution, geography and actors. Earlier coverage, back to 2010, on request.
Shadow-fleet reporting
Stories from Mariel on the ships, managers and listings the sanctions regimes miss.
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Latest Monitor
All past issues →Maritime Watch Monitor, 20 Oct 2026
Brussels sanctions a second tanker manager but not its ships, months after the first case let four tankers sail on. Plus: the 20 sanctioned supertankers Washington could bring back into legitimate trade, and our new Black Sea film.
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