The shadow fleet helping Russia to evade sanctions

Economic sanctions were meant to be the West’s secret weapon against Russia, a way of crippling Vladimir Putin’s war machine and bringing his invasion of Ukraine to a halt without Nato firing a shot. Instead, Russia’s economy and military remain in rude health. After recent heavy attacks north of Kharkiv, Putin’s troops have seized more than 38 square miles of territory and stretched Kyiv’s already thinly deployed defences as they grind forward in Donbas. Putin has demoted his long-serving defence minister Sergei Shoigu, replacing him with the little-known economist Andrei Belousov. Appointing a finance specialist as military chief was a reminder that armies march on money. In Russia’s case, oil money.

Remarkably, since February 2022 the Kremlin has defied more than 16,000 separate sanctions imposed by the US and EU; the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which ended Gazprom’s stranglehold on Europe’s energy supplies; and a costly war that will consume up to 8 per cent of Russia’s GDP this year.