Tankers from the Iranian "shadow fleet" are now working for Russia. This conclusion was made by the British newspaper Financial Times. Its journalists analyzed the maritime traffic of ships and identified tankers that previously supplied Iranian oil in circumvention of Western sanctions, and now help with the export of Russian oil.
The ships serving the Iranian regime switched to oil from Russia, because it became much more profitable to work with Russian suppliers, and the risks are now lower: under certain conditions, it is possible to completely avoid sanctions for cooperation with the Russian regime, in contrast to working with the authorities of Iran or Venezuela. The Financial Times has identified at least 16 tankers that have moved from Iran's "shadow fleet" to Russia's "shadow fleet" in the past two months, up from just nine prior to Western sanctions on Russian oil.
Russia lures shipowners with colossal premiums for transporting its oil. Freight rates are 50, and sometimes even 100% higher than offered by "competitors" from the usual jurisdictions, says Svetlana Lobacheva, senior analyst for tanker transportation at EA Gibson. Such conditions actually force transport companies to switch from Iranian to Russian oil. At the same time, this situation, at least for the time being, does not affect relations between Moscow and Tehran. Iran has even managed to increase its supplies in recent months, and the Islamic Republic coordinates its position on the oil market with Moscow within the framework of OPEC. Kpler analyst Matthew Wright attributes the lack of confrontation over tankers to the fact that both countries were simply able to increase the number of ships in their "shadow fleets".
However, the publication does not share Wright's views. It believes that the introduction of new restrictions on Russian oil products creates conditions for increased tension in the tanker market, which means that the sanctions countries will have to increase competition for ships in the very coming weeks. The FT explains its forecast by the fact that Russia's "shadow fleet" was required to reduce the logistical leverage while optimizing oil supplies to Asia instead of the EU. Now, similar measures will be required to restructure the flows with oil products, which means that the “shadow fleet” will again have to be increased.
Ship brokers are only too happy to take advantage of favorable conditions, because if they comply with Western ceilings, they do not lose anything, but on the contrary, they earn on the increased freight rates that Russia is ready to provide. At the same time, shipowners themselves admit that over the past year the difference between “gray and white” oil supplies has practically disappeared and become invisible.
“Now we are all sinners,” stated one of the sources of the publication in the tanker transportation market.
In order to maintain its own market share and minimize the loss of income from oil exports, Russia has created its own “shadow fleet”. It includes about a hundred tankers that are registered to unknown companies in offshore jurisdictions. Moscow feared that Western sanctions would bring down Russian oil exports, but so far this has not happened. On the contrary, the price ceiling works approximately as Western countries expected: Russian oil products and oil are still on the market, but they are traded at a serious discount (20-50%), which hits Russia's revenues badly.
At the end of January, the Ministry of Finance reported a record budget deficit in monthly terms of 1.8 trillion rubles, which is 14 times more than in January 2022. It hasn't been this high since the 1998 default.