The French navy has intercepted and boarded an oil tanker suspected of illegal fuel trafficking in the Indian Ocean, President Emmanuel Macron announced on Monday. The vessel, the DF Peak, was stopped about 450 nautical miles south of Réunion, the French overseas department east of Madagascar. Macron announced the operation in a post on social media, presenting it as a strike against the shadow fleet that helps Russia sell oil despite sanctions.
Macron said the ship was “suspected of sailing under a false flag”. He posted video on social media that appears to show troops lowering themselves onto the tanker by rope, and said France was determined to fight the so-called shadow fleet wherever it operates in the world. Catherine Vautrin, France’s armed forces minister, congratulated the personnel who carried out the operation. She said the military is escorting the DF Peak so that further checks can be made, under the authority of the prefect of Réunion.
Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, known as the GUR, says the tanker is carrying Russian crude oil and links it to the shipping company Sovcomflot. According to the GUR, the ship was built in 2006 and has sailed under several different flags over its working life.
The shadow fleet is the name given to the tankers that help Moscow get round Western energy sanctions. Those sanctions stop tankers from being chartered or insured unless certain conditions are met, and the fleet relies on complex ownership structures, flags of convenience and other methods to disguise where its cargoes come from. European navies have become more active against it. In June, French forces intercepted another tanker linked to the fleet, the Deliver, off Sicily, which Macron said had been operating “in violation of maritime law”. Several other European countries have reported intercepting shadow fleet ships in recent months.
The EU has also stepped up its response. It boarded a suspected shadow fleet tanker in the Mediterranean at the end of August and, in late September, set out plans to expand its naval mission in that sea to target the fleet. The DF Peak operation takes French enforcement much further afield, into the southern Indian Ocean, and the results of the checks now under way will decide what happens next to the vessel and its cargo.
