A Swedish court has ordered the detention of the Russian captain of a ship that was suspected to be sailing under a false flag in the Baltic Sea and was boarded by authorities last week.
The skipper, 55, was arrested on Friday by the Swedish Prosecution Authority on suspicion of using forged documents.
The Sea Owl One tanker was sailing under the flag of the Comoros, an island nation off East Africa. However, the coast guard has said that it suspects it isn’t in the shipping registry there and therefore there is no flag state to vouch for safety on board. It is also on a list of vessels sanctioned by the EU.
Moscow has previously evaded Western sanctions on its oil exports through a network of tankers with obscure ownership or insurance.
This incident marks the second time in a week that Swedish authorities have seized a vessel suspected of being part of Russia’s shadow fleet.
The Sea Owl One is said to have departed from Brazil en route for Primorsk on Russia’s Baltic coast. The ship was identified to have transported oil between Russia and Brazil several times in recent years, the Swedish coast guard said.
Swedish coast guards intercepted the vessel south of Trelleborg, on Sweden’s southern waters, on Thursday evening.
Officers grew suspicious after the captain presented documents that did not appear to be genuine.
The Russian embassy in Sweden said 10 out of 24 of the sailors aboard the ship, including the captain, were Russian, while the rest were Indonesian.
Earlier this month, the Swedish coast guard investigated a Guinean-flagged cargo ship, the Caffa, on similar grounds. The vessel was sailing from Casablanca in Morocco to St Petersburg.
The coast guard said it regarded the vessel to be stateless “based on national and international legislation”. Swedish police said the ship was suspected of sailing under a false flag.
France has also seized several tankers this year which are believed to have been a part of Russia’s shadow fleet, such as the Grinch in the Mediterranean in January and the Boracay in the Atlantic in October.
Western sanctions have targeted Russia’s oil exports since it invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Moscow’s shadow fleet has also been accused of “spoofing” or misrepresenting their location data, and sabotaging undersea cables and launching drones.