It’s the middle of the night in April 2023 in the East China Sea.

A North Korean-linked oil tanker sailing under another country’s flag suddenly goes dark. It stops transmitting its location using the Automatic Identification System (AIS) machine that all large commercial ships have on board. It simply vanishes from the map.

Ten days later, the ship reappears on global tracking screens. Its signal places it off the coast of southern China.

Except it’s not. It’s actually in a bay many hundreds of kilometres away, preparing to deliver oil to North Korea in violation of UN sanctions.

Justin Hastings, a professor of international relations at the University of Sydney, has been tracking North Korea’s shadow........

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