British Special Forces officers repelled down onto the rusted, red deck of the Nave Andromeda from two Royal Navy Merlin helicopters. Snipers in a third helicopter watched over them, while a naval frigate remained on standby.
The Liberian-flagged crude oil tanker had issued a distress call while in the English Channel in response to the illegal boarding of seven stowaways who had started to threaten crew.
For over 10 hours, the captain of the ship remained in constant communication with the authorities during a tense standoff. But in just nine minutes, Special Forces officers boarded the ship, detained the stowaways and secured the tanker.
It was last time in a rare history that such an operation has been carried out solely by UK forces. As ministers aim to clamp down on Russia’s “shadow fleet”, the operation from October 2020 may now be repeated.
The British Government has signalled its ambition to seize more of the shadow fleet after the successful boarding of Bella 1, which has been renamed the MV Marinera, by US Special Forces assisted by the RAF and the Royal Navy last week.
UK ministers now feel they have a legal standpoint to launch further seizures of sanctioned Russian vessels passing near UK waters, using the 2018 Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act to approve the use of military force on ships which are not legitimately flagged.
But between the Bella-1‘s seizure and the Government’s discovery of the legal grounds they can use to seize ships, at least 45 sanctioned vessels suspected of being part of Putin’s fleet of ghost tankers have passed through the UK’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
This includes 16 sailing through British territorial waters, around 14 miles off UK shores, The i Paper can reveal.
A further five vessels have travelled through UK waters using fake or false identification numbers, making them subject to seizure under the same principles as the Bella-1 operation.
Unclear when UK military action will occur
Putin relies on a vast network of more than 1,400 shadow vessels to evade sanctions, enable illicit trade deals – a major income source for Moscow’s war in Ukraine – and launch hybrid warfare operations in the West.
On Tuesday, a falsely flagged shadow fleet tanker, sanctioned by the UK, US and EU, travelled through UK territorial waters off of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, according to data provided by Starboard Maritime Intelligence. The Adonia was sanctioned in September by the Foreign Office for conducting illicit trades as part of Russia’s shadow fleet.
Mark Douglas, at the maritime monitoring firm, said this latest sighting showed the need for “continued, persistent monitoring of UK waters”.
When the Nave Andromeda was locked in a standoff with British officials in 2020, UK agencies held tense meetings about how to detain the ship, according to two officials involved in the talks.
The Nave Andromeda arriving in Southampton in October 2020 after Armed Forces personnel boarded the vessel (Photo: Finnbarr Webster/Getty)“There was a multi-agency conversation about who would be best placed to board the ship,” a Border Force source said. “We didn’t have the capacity to carry out such a operation on a large tanker and so it was clear it would need to be Special Forces.”
A Foreign Office source who dealt with the conversations at the time said the Special Boat Service (SBS) – an elite unit within the Special Forces – were the only people for the job.
“These operations take hard power,” the Foreign Office official said. “It’s an operation filled with risk, and that’s why you need the SBS.”
An operation filled with risk
The SBS is formed of a unique group of highly trained specialists. Officers form part of the Maritime Counter-Terrorism (MCT) unit within the Special Forces based out of Poole, Dorset. In order to deal with the entire shadow fleet they would need a fleet of helicopters, personnel and naval ships each time.
The seizure of the Bella-1 involved specialised helicopters, gunships and surveillance aircraft, as well as Royal Navy tanker.
A former UK Special Forces officer who carried out vessel boardings, and wished not to be named, said “the reality” was that it would be “inconceivable” for the UK to tackle each Russian shadow fleet tanker they saw.
“The level of planning, it is high risk,” they said. “It’s inconceivable that the UK are going to be doing this on a mass scale.”
The US Air Force was pictured conducting training last week at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire before the operation to seize the Russian-flagged Iranian-linked sanctioned crude oil tanker, MarineraThe former officer who was deployed on MCT rotation said there were a “huge” number of factors to take into consideration when planning tanker seizures, including the weather, direction and speed of travel, and possible threats on board.
“You have to get political buy-in, go through the sign-off process, legal aids give their clearance and only then can you plan to get boots on the ground to carry out the operations,” they said. “The chances of an activity going wrong is quite high.”
The legal powers the Government plans to use on Putin’s tankers
Although they face accusations of engaging in nefarious trades, the legality of trying to seize these ships is still limited under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
The internationally recognised law states that ships, even if sanctioned, are to be given the right of innocent passage through international waters. However, under the same convention, a ship cannot change its flag mid-voyage – which led to the legal argument for the Marinera to be seized. Britain would have much more jurisdiction to act against ships travelling through the UK’s territorial waters – an area of sea 12 nautical miles from shore.
The Government now believes the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act could be applied to any sanctioned vessels not legitimately flagged. There are now plans for the Armed Forces to use these powers in a ramping up of action against the ships, but practical questions remain.
Elizabeth Braw, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, questioned where any ships detained by the UK are going to be kept, and asked if there was space for them in UK ports.
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“Either you have space or you don’t,” she said. “Government ports are essentially naval bases so you would have to put them in some sort of commercial port or harbours. Are there agreements with port operators about who will be compensated.”
She added: “It’s not going to happen.”
When asked about the practicality of carrying out operations and storing detained ships, the Ministry of Defence refused to comment instead pointing to previously released statements.
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