Traders notice strange transshipment of Russian oil from one sanctioned tanker to another

A tanker carrying crude oil from the sanctioned Rosneft has made an unusual transshipment off Mumbai amid the Trump administration's increasing pressure on India over trade with Russia. This was reported by Bloomberg.

The Fortis tanker received about 720,000 barrels of Russian Urals oil from the Ailana on Tuesday, November 4, off the coast of India.

The cargo was transferred from one blacklisted vessel to another, which was also sanctioned. In other words, there was no attempt to conceal its origin, as is usually done in such cases. After that, the oil continued to move to the Indian port of Kochi, as before.

"We are now seeing this uncertainty in the market about the risks of sanctions. The end result is more ship-to-shore transfers, more trickery, longer routes, more complex transactions," explains Rachel Zimba, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C .

The cargo was loaded in the Baltic port of Ust-Luga before the US sanctions against Rosneft were imposed. The Ailana vessel stayed off Mumbai for almost two weeks without a clear reason, after which it reloaded the oil on Fortis and headed back to Russia.

• on October 20, it became known about a rare case of transshipment of Russian gas at sea between two tankers off the coast of Malaysia.
• On October 22, the United States imposed sanctions against two of Russia's largest oil companies, "Rosneft and Lukoil, and called on Russia to immediately agree to a ceasefire.
• According to the Foreign Intelligence Service, Russia's losses from oil sanctions will reach $50 billion a year. This is generally in line with the estimates of Western partners, which were made public by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ($5 billion per month).