Countries around the Baltic Sea have tried virtually every legal tool to deal with an escalating maritime nightmare: a steady traffic of decrepit tankers passing through their waters. And no, scuttling them is not an option — it would be illegal.
But an even bigger problem is now surfacing. Most of these rusting vessels are already beyond their natural lifespan, which means they soon need to be scrapped. This has created a parallel, largely hidden trade whose risks to human life and the environment are profound.
Take the Eagle S. Earlier this month, the notorious vessel ended its days in the Turkish port of Aliaga. Its bow lay beached, its stern still afloat, cranes ripping it apart piece by piece in an open-air operation. The NGO Shipbreaking Platform dryly noted that the environmental impact of this method “is no doubt higher” than recycling in fully enclosed yards. Yet in the broader context, the Eagle S actually received one of the cleaner farewells.
This 229-meter Cook Islands–flagged tanker had been carrying sanctioned Russian oil since early 2023. On Christmas Day, it tore through an astonishing five undersea cables in the Gulf of Finland before Finnish authorities detained it.
A typical shadow vessel — old, lightly maintained and owned through elusive networks — it embodied the perverse economics that drive the shadow fleet. Sanctions-busting remains lucrative, and the outfits that own these ships would never afford new tonnage even if they wanted to. Various surveys put the average vessel age in this fleet at 20 years or more.
Russia’s heavy reliance on the shadow fleet for oil exports has turbocharged its expansion. Many tanker owners concluded they could earn far more selling their aging tonnage into this market than offloading it to shipbreakers.
Today, a large share of the world’s retirement-age oil tankers belongs to this gray universe. But even shadow vessels can only limp on for so long — especially when maintenance is minimal at best. As they become genuinely unsafe, owners quietly pass them to so-called “final journey” companies whose sole business is disposing of dying ships.
In the legitimate shipping world, this final chapter has an established — if imperfect — system: the global scrapping market. In 2024, 409 vessels were dismantled worldwide.
Only a handful ended up in European yards with stringent environmental and labor standards. Turkey handled several more under middling conditions. But roughly two-thirds were scrapped in South Asia, where the industry is synonymous with danger.
On the beaches of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — the latter being the world’s top shipbreaking destination — crews with minimal protective gear take apart giant steel hulls by hand.
The cost advantage is obvious; the human cost is staggering. According to Shipbreaking Platform, 15 workers died and 45 were injured in South Asia last year alone. One tanker accident killed six and injured six others in a single incident.
Now consider what happens when old shadow vessels — often sanctioned, poorly maintained, and structurally compromised — reach their end of life. Their owners cannot simply sell them through normal financial channels, most of which are denominated in U.S. dollars.
At first glance, one might expect these ships to be abandoned in coastal waters, leaving states to handle the problem. But because the steel still has value, this apocalypse scenario has not materialized.
Instead, a clandestine scrapping market is emerging.
Open-source intelligence suggests that shadow-fleet owners now quietly transfer their vessels to final-journey firms or intermediaries at steep discounts. The buyers accept the sanctions risk; the sellers gladly pocket $10–15 million for a large tanker rather than walk away with nothing. Payments are likely routed through crypto or non-dollar currencies.
This murky ecosystem magnifies the danger for workers and the environment. “Thanks to five decades of new rules and regulations, shipping has become far safer, and the number of accidents has fallen significantly,” said Mats Saether, a lawyer with the Nordisk legal services association in Oslo. “It’s regrettable that the shadow fleet is reversing this trend.” It is indeed.
The scrapping of shadow vessels urgently deserves scrutiny. Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs could make a critical contribution by publicly documenting the environmental abuses and human suffering embedded in this trade. And Bangladesh, whose beaches handle much of the world’s shipbreaking, has little reason to tolerate unnecessary deaths tied to Russia’s war-driven oil economy.
There is also room for Western governments to act. They could offer shadow-fleet owners limited legal leniency and a pathway back into the regulated market — in exchange for full disclosure about the fleet’s operations and a commitment to exit the business. Far-fetched? Perhaps. But similar skepticism greeted Italy’s pentiti system before it reshaped the country’s fight against organized crime. The shadow fleet has become a malign growth on global shipping and the world’s waterways. At this point, almost any measure is worth trying.