Sanctioned tankers move to the Russian flag as Europe cuts false flags by half
107 ships joined Russia's registry in 18 months, 87% of them already sanctioned when they switched
European enforcement against Russia's shadow fleet has more than halved the number of ships sailing under false flags, but the vessels have not left the trade. They have moved to the Russian registry instead, a new analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) shows.
The number of shadow fleet ships flying a false flag peaked at 101 in October 2025 and had fallen to 45 by the end of June 2026. European and UK authorities detained about 13 tankers in coastal waters in the first half of this year. French forces boarded the 114,809 dwt tanker Tagor in the Mediterranean in May, and British forces seized a crude tanker in the English Channel in June for breaching Russian sanctions.
Over the same period Russia's own flag has become the refuge. Between January 2025 and June 2026, 107 vessels joined the Russian registry, lifting it from 280 to 382 ships, an increase of 36%. Of the newcomers, 87% were already under sanctions when they reflagged, and 56% had flown at least one false flag between being sanctioned and joining. Only 12 ships left the registry in that time, and two of them later returned. By June, 72 of the 107 had delivered €7.5bn worth of Russian fossil fuels.
The inflow peaked in December 2025, when 25 vessels joined in a single month, and has since slowed from 17 in January to three in June. CREA attributes the decline largely to "a draft presidential decree proposing to cap the age of vessels the registry accepts".
The report also tracks the collapse of the flags that carried the fleet before. Registrations with Comoros and Gambia fell away after sanctions on Intershipping Services LLC, Barbados and Palau removed all their sanctioned ships, and Panama cut its sanctioned tonnage by two thirds.
Two cases illustrate the shift. The 2003-built LNG carrier Arctic Metagaz, which joined the Russian registry, exploded in the Mediterranean in March while carrying 60,000 tonnes of Russian LNG and drifted for more than a month without a Russian salvage operation, leaving Libya, Malta and Italy to manage the casualty. The Boracay, detained by France off Saint-Nazaire in September 2025, reappeared under the Russian flag in January 2026 as Phoenix.
The CREA report calls on Europe to pre-empt alternative registries, build enforcement and incident-response capacity for Russian-flagged ships, introduce flag certification at maritime chokepoints, expand Nordic-Baltic inspections, keep maritime tracking data open and widen investigations based on satellite imagery.
This story is part of the Maritime Briefing of 29 September 2026.
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