



Sanctioned oil trade is booming in the shadows, to India's and China’s benefit
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. With the US's recent invasion of Venezuela, and sanction and tariff threats on trade with Iran, the so-called global ‘shadow fleet’ of oil tankers is in focus again. Used to transport oil by countries under Western sanctions such as Russia, Iran and Venezuela, the size of this fleet has grown manifold and now accounts for an estimated 18.5% of global tanker capacity, according to S&P Global.
It’s called a shadow fleet because it uses various methods to evade detection by sanctions-enforcement agencies, such as frequently changing the name of the ship and its flag (the country where it is registered), and turning off its transponder to make it invisible to GPS satellites. The shadow fleet came into its own following the Russia-Ukraine war that began in 2022 as the West imposed sanctions on oil transport by Russia. To evade these sanctions, Russia developed a ‘shadow’ or ‘dark’ fleet of oil tankers, which adopted various methods to conceal their ownership and the origin of the oil they were transporting.
According to Kpler, a maritime analytics and intelligence firm, the size of the shadow fleet grew from just 97 vessels in 2022 to around 3,313 vessels by the end of 2025, an increase of 3,315%. In 2025 this shadow fleet moved about $100 billion of crude oil, accounting for 6-7% of global oil flows. “What began as isolated compliance breaches has become a structural layer of global trade in 2025, with obfuscation now functioning as a new operating model rather than an anomaly," said Kpler.
Tankers in the shadow fleet tend to be much older than normal cargo ships. They are often uninsured and have extremely opaque ownership structures to evade detection. ‘Shadow fleet’ is an umbrella term
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