Of all the weapons in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal, the most strategically crucial has proved to be not hypersonic missiles but the motley fleet of oil tankers that have allowed Russian oil to keep flowing to international markets. Oil dollars have been the lifeblood of Russia’s war economy during four years of conflict. And the West’s failure to shut that export business down has, so far, been the single most important factor behind Putin’s continued military resilience.

Economic sanctions were supposed to be the West’s superpower to punish the Kremlin for invading Ukraine in February 2022. So how come Russia now exports more oil by sea than it did at the beginning of the war? And why have Europe and the US proved powerless to stop Russia’s so-called ‘shadow fleet’ from operating?

There are signs Europe and the US are ready to get serious about shutting down Putin’s oil lifeline

Part of the answer is that until very recently the West has shied away from actually banning the buying and selling of Russian oil and gas. Russia produces around ten million barrels of oil a day and exports half of that, making it second only to the US and Saudi Arabia as an international supplier. That’s far too large a volume for the West simply to try to ban. Fearful of creating a price spike, the Biden administration imposed a floating price cap about 15 per cent below market prices to try to suppress the Kremlin’s profits from exporting oil without strangling world supply. The result was that Russia was able effectively to shrug off western sanctions.

The other reason is that the operators of shadow fleet tankers quickly became adept at bamboozling international watchdogs by regularly changing the nationality of ships (known as re-flagging), falsifying paperwork on prices paid by end users (known as attestation fraud), switching off location transponders, and transferring dodgy Russian oil into other tankers at sea.

Russia’s insurers Rosgosstrakh and Ingosstrakh (plus some Indian insurers) also began writing policies for tankers that respectable London firms refused to cover. By September 2022,........

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