West still buying Russian Oil, but It’s harder to track
Europe continues to buy 45% of its gas from Russia, even after the invasion. Germany: 55% of the natural gas, 52% of the coal & 34% of mineral oil used comes from Russia. But India must think about its place in history books if it buys Russian oil? This is where West’s hypocrisy stinks.
An opaque market is forming to obscure the origin of Russia’s oil as more tankers are loaded without a precise destination. Russia ramped up oil shipments to key customers in recent weeks, defying its pariah status in world energy markets. One increasingly popular method for delivery: tankers marked “destination unknown.”
Oil from Russian ports is increasingly being shipped with its destination unknown. In April so far, over 11.1 million barrels were loaded into tankers without a planned route, more than to any country. That is up from almost none before the invasion. One reason to obscure the origin of Russian oil is that countries desperately need the crude to keep economies going and prevent fuel prices from surging even further. But companies and oil middlemen want to trade it quietly, avoiding any blowback for facilitating transactions that in the end provide money for Moscow’s war machine.
Russia is relabeling oil tankers ‘destination unknown’ to quietly deliver energy to Europe Russian oil has been seeping its way back into Europe in recent weeks, as Western oil traders work around the energy’s undesirable reputation. Even as sanction threats and bad publicity mount, oil has been discretely leaving Russia in tankers headed to “destination unknown,” and European oil traders have been buying it up under the radar. Over the course of April, an average of 1.6 million barrels of oil have left Russia every day, heading to unknown destinations, TankerTrackers.com found. According to a new report by the Wall Street Journal, the practice is increasing, with more than 11.1 million barrels of oil loaded into tankers without a planned route in April—up from almost zero before the Ukraine war began.
Where is ‘destination unknown’?
The use of the “destination unknown” label means the oil is being taken to larger ships at sea and mixed in with oil from other destinations, confusing its origin. It’s a long-running practice first used by other sanctioned countries including Iran and Venezuela. The practice of “destination unknown” oil shipping is similar to other spotty practices developed to hide the purchase of Russian oil. Dark activity, or when ships turn off their transponders for several hours, has increased by 600% since the invasion of Ukraine, according to maritime risk management company Windward.
