Flags of Deceit:" Re-Flagging Trends among Sanctioned Ships in the Russian Shadow Fleet

Since the beginning of its invasion of Ukraine, Western nations have imposed sanctions on Russian trade, in particular its fleet of oil tankers. To evade these sanctions, Russia has introduced a fleet of ships that bypass, through different means, the sanctions imposed against the country. Using open, collated data on sanctions against this "shadow fleet," this paper provides the first quantitative evaluation of re-flagging among sanctioned Russian vessels. While initially often sailing under classical "flags of convenience" (FOC), the maritime journal Lloyd's List has recently noted that increasingly ships in this fleet are re-flagged to countries with even less rigorous controls than classical FOC countries. These "flags of deceit" (FOD) are claimed to welcome older ships, often under fake identifiers. In this paper, we confirm that Russia is, indeed, re-flagging to countries like Cameroon and Sierra Leone, while also providing more detail on patterns in the tonnage and age among different FODs.