British forces boarded and seized a sanctioned Russian oil tanker in the English Channel in the early hours of Sunday, in what the Ministry of Defence described as the first UK-led operation of its kind.
The vessel, named as the Smyrtos, was intercepted by Royal Marine commandos and specially trained officers from the National Crime Agency during a six-hour operation. It is being held off the south coast of England as investigations continue.
The seizure is the first time Britain has led an interdiction of a shadow fleet vessel in its own waters, after months in which UK assets had supported similar operations by allies.
What happened?
The MoD said Royal Marine commandos and National Crime Agency officers boarded the Smyrtos in the Channel during the early hours of Sunday, in an operation that lasted six hours.
The Times reported that the marines descended from a CH-47 Chinook helicopter. The MoD confirmed Chinooks had been involved in the operation.
The operation was also supported by the frigate HMS Sutherland and the minehunter HMS Ledbury, an RAF P-8 surveillance aircraft, and aircraft from the Maritime Air Group, including Merlin Mk4 and Wildcat helicopters.
The tanker, marked with a red dot, shown to be off the coast of Dorset (Photo: Marine Traffic)In a statement released by the MoD, Starmer said: “This operation delivers yet another blow to Russia and reminds those fueling Putin’s war in Ukraine that they cannot hide.”
He paid tribute to “our Armed Forces and law enforcement officers who keep this country safe 24 hours a day, 365 days a year”.
Dan Jarvis, who was appointed defence secretary on Thursday, said in the same statement: “Operations like this require skill, professionalism and courage.” He added that Russia “relies on its shadow fleet to fund their conflict in Ukraine”.
The i Paper revealed last month that British naval units and Special Forces teams were on standby, but that the Government had held back over concerns about the legality of operations at sea, the risk of a boarding going wrong, and the need for any seizure to be signed off at the highest level.
The vessel will be moved to an anchorage off the south coast and monitored for environmental or safety concerns. The MoD has not yet said what will happen to the tanker’s crew.
The MoD said the seizure was carried out in line with domestic and international law, citing Article 110 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea – which lets a warship verify a vessel’s flag where it is suspected of having no nationality – after Keir Starmer authorised forced boardings on 25 March.
What is the shadow fleet?
The shadow fleet is a network of aging tankers with opaque ownership that Russia uses to export oil and evade Western sanctions imposed after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The MoD says the fleet numbers more than 700 vessels and carries 75 per cent of Russia’s sanctioned oil, generating revenue the Government says funds missiles and drones used against Ukraine.
Each shadow fleet ship is usually owned not by an identifiable firm but by a shell company – a business that exists largely on paper, with no real operations, set up to obscure who ultimately controls the vessel.
Shadow fleet operators also often register the vessels in states with light-touch regulation and minimal oversight – known as “flags of convenience” – which makes the ship harder to scrutinise or hold to account.
Once at sea, the tankers use several methods to stay hidden. One is the ship-to-ship transfer – pumping oil from one vessel to another in open water, away from the port authorities who would otherwise log the cargo and where it came from.
Operators also tamper with the systems that identify and track a ship, such as using fake vessel identification numbers and spoofing location data – feeding false coordinates to the automatic signals meant to broadcast a ship’s real position.
The MoD says more than 72 per cent of shadow tankers are over 15 years old, and that there have been more than 50 incidents involving the fleet.
The Government says the sanctions are reducing the Kremlin’s income. It says Russia’s oil and gas revenues fell by 24 per cent year-on-year in 2025, and that ships sanctioned by the UK carried $1.6bn less Russian oil in the first quarter of 2025 than a year earlier.
The MoD says the UK has now sanctioned almost 600 shadow fleet vessels.
How does it fit with allied operations?
Sunday’s seizure is the first the UK has led, after months of supporting interceptions by European allies.
French forces boarded the sanctioned tanker Tagor around 400 nautical miles west of Brittany on 1 June, with the British warship HMS Somerset and its helicopter tracking the vessel beforehand.
The Tagor had left Russia’s northern shores in late May flying the flag of Madagascar before switching to Cameroon mid-voyage – a change that, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, made it liable to seizure.
Emmanuel Macron said on X that the operation had the “support of several partners including the United Kingdom”. The Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the seizure “illegal” and “bordering on international piracy”.
Belgium, France, Sweden and Finland have all carried out forced boardings of suspected shadow fleet vessels, while the US has seized Russian and Iranian-linked tankers, including the Bella-1 off the UK earlier this year.
Pressure on the Government to act in its own waters had been building. At least 205 sanctioned tankers had sailed through the UK’s exclusive economic zone since Starmer’s crackdown was announced, 84 of them entering British territorial waters, according to data provided to The i Paper by Starboard Maritime Intelligence.
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