Russian Shadow Fleet in the Turkish Straits, Old Tankers, Thin Insurance and a City of 16 Million

On 6 January 2026 the tanker Elbus, flagged in Palau and heading for a Russian port, sailed north through the Bosporus past Dolmabahçe, Bebek and Rumeli Hisarı. Two days later a sea drone, presumed Ukrainian, hit it off İnebolu on Turkey's Black Sea coast, and the damaged ship limped to anchor under the eye of the Turkish coast guard. It was one of a string of Russia-linked tankers attacked within reach of the Turkish shore since November 2025. All of them had been, or were about to be, in the Bosporus.

These ships are what the West calls Russia's shadow fleet: older tankers bought through shell companies, flagged in small registries, insured by firms nobody in London has heard of, and used to move Russian oil around the G7 price cap. Every barrel they load at Novorossiysk or Tuapse that goes to the Mediterranean, India or Turkey's own refineries has to pass through Istanbul.

Photo: Alexxx1979, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Price caps and paperwork

The cap came into force in December 2022. Western shipping, insurance and finance companies may only handle Russian crude sold below a set price, first 60 dollars a barrel, cut by the EU to 47.60 in September 2025 and to 44.10 dollars from 1 February 2026. Russia's answer was to buy its own fleet. By August 2026, 52 percent of its seaborne oil moved on sanctioned shadow tankers, and of the 150 shadow ships carrying Russian crude and products that month, nearly half were at least 20 years old.

Turkey reacted to the cap in a way that briefly made it look tougher than Brussels. From December 2022 its maritime authority demanded that every laden tanker entering the straits show a letter from its insurer confirming cover for the transit. The protection and indemnity clubs balked, and within days more than twenty tankers were stuck off the Bosporus, most of them carrying Kazakh crude that wasn't under sanctions at all. The jam cleared after Turkey and the insurers reached a deal on 13 December. The rule's real purpose was simple: if a shadow tanker spills in the strait, Turkey wants someone to send the bill to.

Who buys, who profits

The convention behind the straits gives Turkey little choice about letting merchant ships pass. What it does with the oil is another matter. Under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey has become the largest buyer of Russian oil products since the EU banned them in February 2023, taking about a quarter of Russia's exports, and in August 2026 it was the third-biggest importer of Russian fossil fuels of any kind, at about 1.5 billion euros. In the same month, nine of the twenty shipments of fuel made from Russian crude that reached EU ports came from Turkish refineries. Russian oil goes in, is refined, and comes out as fuel that Europe buys.

That trade has made Turkish refiners and Russia's budget richer. It has not made ordinary Turks better off; they spent the same years living through one of the worst inflation crises in the country's history, brought on by Erdoğan's insistence on cutting interest rates as prices soared. Kyiv has complained openly that Ankara tolerates shadow tankers in its straits.

The danger in the middle of the city

The attacks have shifted from tankers on the open sea to tankers near the Turkish coast. In late November 2025 the Kairos and the Virat were hit by Ukrainian sea drones about 35 miles off Turkey's northern coast; the Kairos burned and was disabled. On 28 May 2026 three more were struck by drones off the Turkish coast north of the strait: the James II, reported about 77 kilometres from the Bosporus, and the Altura and Velora, hit during a ship-to-ship transfer. All three were running empty.

A laden tanker hit inside the Bosporus would be a different story. The strait is narrow, the current runs at up to seven or eight knots at its sharpest bend, and both shores are lined with homes. Istanbul remembers what that looks like. In 1979 the Romanian tanker Independenta collided with a Greek freighter off Haydarpaşa and burned for weeks; more than 40 people died and about 95,000 tonnes of crude was lost. In 1994 the Cypriot tanker Nassia caught fire after a collision and burned for four days, killing 27.

One proposal, made in a Carnegie Europe paper in July 2026, is for Turkey to use the convention's sanitary-inspection clause to board the riskiest shadow tankers before they enter the strait. Ankara has shown no sign of doing it. Inspecting Russian ships would cost Erdoğan goodwill in Moscow, and so far that has always outweighed the risk to his own largest city.

The oil keeps moving, one ageing tanker at a time.