The number of merchant ships sailing under the Russian flag has increased by more than a hundred in just a year and a half, which represents an increase of more than a third of the Russian registry. Most of these new additions belong to the so-called ghost fleet, made up of old ships, often uninsured and opaquely owned, which, according to the definition of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) “evade compliance with safety regulations”, for example by turning off the transponder that indicates their position and route, in order to “evade sanctions”. In this case, those imposed by Western countries as punishment for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Traditionally, ships used by various networks to circumvent sanctions have raised the flags of states such as Panama, Liberia, Sierra Leone or the Marshall Islands, due to their low cost, lax regulation and lack of transparency. Some of these Russian license plates, for example, are managed by private companies based in other countries, such as Cyprus or the United Arab Emirates, whose commercial legislation allows them to act with great opacity.
But these countries, under pressure from the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, have begun to cooperate and expel from their maritime censuses the vessels sanctioned or considered part of the ghost fleet. "Barbados and Palau have completely emptied their lists of sanctioned vessels, and Panama has reduced their number by almost two-thirds. [...] Cameroon, another registry with little oversight, has deregistered 35 sanctioned vessels since last April," explains the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), based in Helsinki, in a report published Friday. For example, registrations in the Comoros Islands and the Gambia – two registries that began to be widely used by the ghost fleet last year – plummeted as soon as Brussels and London sanctioned the company that managed them, Intershipping Services LLC, based in Dubai.
Arrests have skyrocketed
So “many of the vessels expelled from open registries began using false flags, a practice that renders them stateless and leaves them uninsured,” the report notes. However, affected countries periodically warn that these ships are using their flag illegally, and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) allows authorities to board and inspect vessels without nationality. Arrests have skyrocketed, especially by European authorities, since the French Navy captured the Boracay oil tanker at the end of September 2025, which was transporting oil from a Russian port in the Baltic to India and was flying a false Benin flag.
This pressure has reduced the number of ghost fleet ships sailing under false flags to less than half, about 45 in total, according to CREA estimates. This has left the shipowners of the ghost fleet with few options: either they continue to register their ships in countries that barely respect the sanctions or they jump from flag to flag, false or not (the Boracay, for example, changed its flag five times in 15 months after being sanctioned by the United Kingdom for its role in the Russian oil trade). And, as a last option, they register in Russia. “Vessels from the ghost fleet have been absorbed into the Russian registry as other options have been closed to them,” the report states.
According to data collected by CREA, between January 2025 and the end of June 2026, 107 vessels were registered in the Russian registry, which has increased to 382 vessels. Of these vessels, the Finnish think-tank has detected that a good part of them are oil tankers - and to a lesser extent LNG tankers - that have continued to be involved in the transport of Russian hydrocarbons, in many cases from ports in western Russia (in the Baltic or the Black Sea) that then cross the waters of European States to take them to China and other Asian countries. The fact that they carry the Russian flag prevents their boarding by the European authorities, although they can be denied port and services since they remain sanctioned.
