The oil spill in the Baltic Sea east of Gotland was discovered on Thursday morning and has since been traced to the tanker Flora 1. The Coast Guard began boarding on Friday morning.
"In connection with our identification of the ship, we note that it is on the EU sanctions list. There is a lot of interesting information that we need to follow up on," said Mattias Lindholm, a press officer at the Coast Guard, to TT.
He continues:
"Right now there is a criminal suspicion of environmental crime. We will see if this leads to further criminal suspicions."
According to Lindholm, at least 2,000 liters of oil have been released.
The ship will be anchored just south of Ystad. No one has been arrested.
"Unclear flag status"
Flora 1 is registered in Sierra Leone.
"There is a lot of uncertainty about the flag status and which flag state this ship belongs to, and that is, of course, interesting."
The Minister of Civil Defense, Carl-Oskar Bohlin (M), writes in a post on X that the government is taking the incident seriously:
"The Russian shadow fleet, consisting of older, inadequately insured tankers that evade sanctions, poses a significant security and environmental threat."
Unclear rules
There is no clear definition of what constitutes the Russian shadow fleet, which is why the Coast Guard doesn't really want to use the term. However, the term "shadow fleet" is used for a number of tankers that Russia uses to circumvent sanctions.
The ships are generally outdated and evade regulations, including flying false flags, not always transmitting identification signals, and having unclear insurance conditions.
"In that respect, you could say that Flora 1 belongs to the shadow fleet. It clearly shows such characteristics, and we were able to establish that when we identified this ship as a likely source of emissions," said Mattias Lindholm.
Third boarding
This is the third time in a month that the Coast Guard has boarded a ship suspected of sailing under a false flag. On March 12, police and the Coast Guard boarded the tanker Sea Owl outside Trelleborg.
The ship is on the EU sanctions list and last week the Russian master was re-arrested, suspected of using a false document, a felony. Six days earlier, the bulk carrier Caffa was boarded outside Trelleborg, and this ship's Russian master is also in custody, suspected of the same crime.
A large proportion of ships in global maritime traffic sail under so-called flags of convenience. This means that the ship is registered in a country other than the one where its owner is based – usually to circumvent regulations, high tax requirements and wage costs. This has happened in various forms for many centuries.
A so-called country of convenience allows any number of foreign ships to be registered there.
In the years that Russia's notorious shadow fleet has grown, an increasing number of tankers sailing to and from Russian ports have been registered in, for example, the Cook Islands, Gabon, Cameroon, Palau, Vietnam and Saint Kitts and Nevis.
The trade union organization International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) labels a total of 42 countries or territories as so-called flags of convenience.
