“Alarm” is “rising” over the use of sanctioned “shadow fleet” vessels by Russia, Iran and Venezuela in order to ship oil to large customers, including China and India, reports The Guardian. “The increasingly aggressive efforts to police the shadow fleet and evidence that Russia is willing to use military assets to protect tankers, has led experts to warn of the risk of confrontation,” claims The Guardian. “That was dramatically underlined on Friday [Dec. 19] when Ukraine announced it had struck a Russian tanker with aerial drones in neutral waters off the coast of Libya, after previous similar attacks in the Black Sea.” What The Guardian won’t say, is that what’s actually going on is not “policing,” but outright economic warfare.
The NATO war party claims that Russian “shadow fleet” vessels aren’t just carrying oil, but are also platforms for “hybrid warfare” against Europe, though they present no evidence substantiating such claims.
But seizures like those by the U.S. aimed at Venezuela or attacks like those conducted by the Kiev regime risk escalating into military confrontation. “It is one thing for the U.S. to board a sanctioned and stateless tanker off Venezuela, because what is Venezuela going to do?” one unnamed analyst said to The Guardian. “It feels like a very different calculation for the Europeans with Russia. It risks upping the stakes in what has become a game of chicken.”
