The hunt for Russia’s secret ships – POLITICO

ISTANBUL — Yörük Işık puts down his espresso cup suddenly and picks up his camera. “This one is carrying diesel,” he says, training the long lens on a rusted red tanker bobbing into view in the distance. “Maybe in violation of the price cap.”

For more than a decade, he’s watched the waters in his native Istanbul, tracking the comings and goings of the tens of thousands of grain carriers, container vessels and warships that chart a course along the Bosphorus Strait every year. The natural canal flowing through the heart of Europe’s largest city links the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, connecting Russia and Ukraine to the rest of the world.

“I’m obsessive,” he explains, “I don’t like to go too far inland because I have this fear I’ll miss something. You never know what’s going to happen and often you don’t realize it’s suspicious until afterwards. Even when I have free time or I’m writing a report, I sit on my balcony so I can keep an eye out.”

With his long hair and grey beard, Işık doesn’t stand out among the fishermen, tug captains and dock workers making a living in Turkey’s ports. But as a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think-tank, the 52-year-old has built up unparalleled evidence of Russia’s efforts to quietly acquire sanctioned goods and military hardware — while keeping energy and agricultural exports flowing to help pay for them. A regular analyst in Turkish media and on television, his Bosphorus Observer site has become a go-to resource for those tracking the Kremlin’s supply routes.

Ultimately, it’s a battle that could decide the outcome of the war in Ukraine.

“It’s all about finding out what they’re hiding,” he said, looking out from the café on the Bosphorus as the call to prayer wafts across the water from the half-dozen or so white minarets that dot the hillside.

“Sometimes they’ll lie and say a ship is going from one perfectly innocent place to another. They’ll turn their tracking off and go dark in the Black Sea or spoof their location. Along the waterway is endless traffic, it’s like watching an Istanbul taxi rank, but when you look closer and see the ship physically isn’t there, that tells you a lot. The camera doesn’t lie.”

Troubled waters

Just 500 kilometers away across the Black Sea, Russia’s war is raging in Ukraine. Since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Western nations have imposed sweeping sanctions on Moscow in an effort to cut it off from luxury products and dual-use goods that could be repurposed for use on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the G7 club of nations has imposed a $60 per barrel cap on Russian crude oil, threatening steep penalties for traders who flout the rules.

But analysts and policymakers fear not enough is being done to make the restrictions stick and helping Russia get hold of what it wants has become big business for middlemen — both companies and countries — prepared to take the risk.

“It’s very difficult to track what’s coming from Europe to Russia and vice versa,” said George Voloshin, an expert in sanctions circumvention with financial crime watchdog ACAMS. “We have a very incomplete picture because Russia is trying to adapt to increasingly stringent sanctions and once you have a control in place, they find a way around it. Turkey is the gateway for that kind of trade — particularly for European consumer goods.”

According to statistics collated by analytics platform Trade Data Monitor, seen by POLITICO, Turkey is the fifth-biggest source of Russia’s imports, shipping more than $3.6 billion worth of goods and commodities last year alone. Machinery and electronic components are among its top exports for 2023, up 200 percent and 183 percent respectively in the first six months of this year. And that doesn’t even include the supplies that simply transit the Bosphorus without ever formally entering Turkey.

“Ankara has carved a role for itself where on one hand it’s an intermediary in the conflict, but on the other a convenient geographical hub for the re-export of things that Moscow needs,” said Maria Shagina, a senior fellow working on sanctions policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“That ranges from oil and diesel shipments to military hardware. For Russia, this comes at a cost — but, at the moment, it’s profitable and it’s hell-bent on winning a war of attrition this way over time.”

Chasing a shadow

Meanwhile, a so-called shadow fleet of hundreds of aging tankers has emerged on the global market over the past year to haul embargoed Russian energy exports and buy oil above the price cap, giving the Kremlin much-needed revenues to pay its troops and purchase weaponry. Without proper maintenance or insurance, they frequently turn off their transponders to hide the origin of their fuel or carry out ship-to-ship transfers to confuse those watching from afar.

In June, the EU moved to bar these vessels from its ports — but many continue to sail through the Bosphorus.

“The shadow fleet was all under the flag of the Marshall Islands, and they were all deregistered thanks to successful U.S. diplomacy,” said Işık. “Then, in one night, the whole shadow fleet moved to Gabon registration. Maybe next it will move to Cameroon or Palau. When you see these flags, it’s not that they’re immediately guilty, but there’s a higher chance you’ll find something compared to others.”

With warnings that circumvention could prolong the war, costing more Ukrainian lives, Brussels is ramping up pressure to tighten existing loopholes. According to Voloshin, those like Işık who monitor ports and waterways can be “very useful” in piecing together the full scale of the problem and helping target sanctions against those involved. “You need people like that at every single dock and airport, but unfortunately that’s impossible.”

Worse still for the maritime industry, unprecedented Western sanctions mean unsuspecting companies could fall foul of the existing rules inadvertently. “The EU’s latest sanctions package has introduced the first ban on spoofing anywhere in the world,” said Ami Daniel, co-founder of Windward, an Israeli tech firm that tracks vessels suspected of sanctions circumvention using satellite imagery.

“Anyone doing business with vessels suspected of that kind of activity as well as vessel who turn off transmissions or conduct unreported ship-to-ship transfer could face criminal charges, fines or see their goods impounded. If a container under the transit ban — chemicals, automotive, technology — makes an unscheduled stop in Russia, it becomes untradeable, and without due diligence major companies could be caught up in that.”

Playing both sides

Of even greater concern are the ships said to be covertly supplying Russia’s armed forces.

“With naval ships, you can see their flags, it’s not something secret. But some are now disguising themselves as merchant vessels — they might do commercial jobs, or hire civilian crews to hide it, but they’re carrying Russian Armed Forces equipment and not flying a naval flag,” said Işık.

“Turkey isn’t inspecting these ships. During the Syrian war, when there was lots of tension with Russia, Turkey created lots of headaches for naval auxillary vessels, and there’s plenty of evidence put out by people like me that these ships are operating in this way. But Ankara isn’t being creative or coming up with new approaches at the moment.”

Despite being a member of NATO, Turkey has refused to impose sanctions on Moscow, instead hosting a series of ill-fated peace talks and stepping up economic relations with both sides. That policy seems to reflect public opinion inside the country where, according to a poll last year from Aksoy Research, nearly two thirds of Turkish people worry that the war is having a negative impact on their country — but 80 percent believe they still need to stay neutral.

As part of efforts to insulate itself from the consequences of the conflict, Ankara also underwrote the U.N.-brokered grain deal, credited with helping get food supplies from Ukraine’s blockaded ports to the developing world. Its collapse following the Kremlin’s withdrawal last month has sparked fears of famine and led to a spate of Russian attacks on Ukrainian export infrastructure. Turkey’s National Security Council has since warned tension in the Black Sea “is not in anyone’s benefit,” but stopped at calling for the two sides to return to the negotiating table.

“The Turkish government would rather see predictability than not, but it’s clear their government has been compensated from the conflict,” Ryan Gingeras, a professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, told POLITICO. “They’ve abetted stolen shipments of grain out of Ukraine — they’ve made sure they’ve stayed on good relations with Moscow, as well as Kyiv, but the collapse of the grain deal shows the limits to which Ankara can exert influence over the Black Sea.”

War on the waves

Ukraine is now evidently intent on dealing with the threat Russia poses itself.

Last week, Kyiv declared the waters around Russia’s Black Sea ports a “war risk area” from August 23 until further notice. Speaking to POLITICO, Oleg Ustenko, an economic adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said that his country views “everything the Russians are moving back and forth on the Black Sea [as] our valid military targets.”

Hours earlier, the Ukrainian armed forces reportedly hit a Russian fuel tanker, the Sig, with a sea drone, causing it serious damage. The ship, sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2019, had been sailing close to Ukraine’s occupied Crimean peninsula, carrying 43,123 barrels of fuel oils.

“The target they chose was the most wonderful one,” Işık beamed.

“The Sig is a ship that, along with its sister ship Yaz, has been assisting the Russian armed forces for more than half a decade now. Hitting the Sig, which is a secret Russian naval auxillary vessel carrying kerosene from refineries in occupied Crimea, hits Russian logistics in Syria, it hurts the profits of the Kremlin-linked elites making money from that trade and cuts the money being used to pay their private militaries.”

“If my work helped Ukraine identify it then I’m proud, because I’ve been after it for a long, long, long time,” he said.“There’s 15-20 other targets like that, and I think Ukraine knows about them all. Given the world has chosen not to take action, they have acted.”

But for Işık, Istanbul isn’t just a place to watch the war unfold — it holds the key to ending it.

“This city has been here for thousands of years because of the waterway,” he said, swilling coffee grounds around the bottom of his cup. “If you control the water, you control the trade — and then you get to decide how the world works.”