The shadow fleet, and the ships nobody would insure
A price cap enforced through Western insurance can be answered by buying old tankers and insuring them elsewhere. By 2024 the response was to designate the vessels themselves, one hull at a time.
The price cap was enforced through the insurance market, so the answer was predictable: buy older tankers, register them opaquely, insure them outside the mainstream market and sail anyway. By 2024 several hundred vessels were operating this way.
The response was to designate them individually — specific hulls, by name and IMO number, barred from Union ports and services. That turns a general restriction into a list a port authority, a bunker supplier or a classification society can actually check against.
The other measure in the same period
The fourteenth package, adopted in June 2024, prohibited the transshipment of russian liquefied natural gas through European Union ports for onward export to third countries. Not an import ban — a ban on using European infrastructure as a relay to somewhere else.
There is a maritime safety dimension worth stating. Ageing tankers with unclear ownership, uncertain insurance and no meaningful inspection regime are a pollution risk to every coastal state they pass. That is a legitimate concern quite separate from sanctions policy, and it is why port states outside the sanctioning coalition also began paying attention.
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