By Tom Sharpe*
By the middle of September, Norwegian environmental group Bellona had counted 50 shadow-fleet oil tankers and 18 LNG carriers on Russia’s Northern Sea Route (NSR), in two months of the navigation season. For the whole of 2025 these figures were 38 and 13.
Around three-quarters of the tankers were sanctioned.
Twenty six were classed Ice3 or lower, that is they were only lightly strengthened for operations in ice – they were not icebreakers of even the lowest grade – or had no ice class at all, and 33 were at least 15 years old. And since last year the NSR administration has stopped publishing incident reports, so if a tanker comes to grief in the Kara Sea we will hear about it from a Russian insurer, if at all. That clock has been ticking for a while, and just got louder.
Bellona has been watching Russia’s Arctic since the Soviet Northern Fleet was dumping old reactors in that same sea. Its transparency centre does this ship by ship, from open sources, names and flags listed. We can trust them.
The NSR can be transited by normal-ish vessels with the aid of Russian icebreakers from say July to mid-November – there’s nothing new about this, though the world’s media are perennially surprised by it. Increased navigation in the NSR has had more to do with the introduction and improvement of Russia’s nuclear icebreaker fleet than climate change. Unassisted ships have a much shorter window, and arguably vessels with no ice class at all should never use it. It is a risky option: as we can see it is mostly used by sanctioned ships these days.
Oil and gas are different problems. A shadow tanker is a sanctions and pollution risk: old hull, low ice class, no reputable insurer, operating in first-year ice with nobody coming to the rescue. The gas carriers are generally newer and better classed, but they are the route to market for a project sanctioned precisely so that it would not have one. Different ships, different pressure points.
What are our options? We should put the NSR regulars on the shadow fleet list, not just the Baltic ones – Bellona has published the names. We should lean on the flag states that keep appearing, starting with Oman: six of the tankers and two of the gas carriers were sailing under its flag. We should use port-state control and the insurers to squeeze the non-ice-class hulls before the ice season, not after. Share ice-zone tracking with the Nordics through the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) and Nato’s new Arctic Sentry.
The JEF already has the machinery. Nordic Warden, run from British naval headquarters in Northwood since January 2025, watches 22 areas from the Channel to the Baltic, and in Helsinki in March its leaders promised closer work on the shadow fleet. We should push that watch north into the Norwegian and Barents Seas, feed it satellite and patrol-aircraft data rather than ship-tracker AIS alone, and link it to Arctic Sentry.
Finally, we should treat the NSR administration’s silence on incidents as a sanctions and safety issue, not merely an environmental one.
Sooner or later you move from diplomacy and tracking to hardware. Here we are thin.
*Tom Sharpe OBE served for 27 years as a Royal Navy officer, commanding four different warships.
This article was first published by The Telegraph and republished with the author’s permission.
