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A rotating selection from the paid serviceWhere do “shadow fleet” tankers come from?
One tanker, four names: how a ship that spent five years in the Western fleet became a sanctioned “shadow fleet” tanker. A short film built from Mariel data.
Read the article →Shadow fleet: Brussels answers on the ships it didn't list
The European Union can sanction a company for running shadow fleet tankers without barring the tankers themselves, the EU's foreign affairs spokesperson has…
Shadow fleet: the ships the EU didn't list
The European Union sanctioned a Turkish tanker operator on 15 June for running three ships it said lacked insurance and hid their movements while carrying…
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?
What subscribers get
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The documents behind it
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, 13 October 2026
The file firms use to check whether a counterparty is under EU sanctions is, the European Commission now says, “provided for information purposes only”. It carries no legal weight and does not replace the legal acts in the Official Journal,…
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