Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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President Trump says that the United States has now seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela.
Since December, the U.S. has been stopping and seizing oil tankers traveling in and out of Venezuela.
Largest one ever seized, Nick.
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Chapter 2: How has the U.S. responded to oil tankers from Venezuela?
But then, obviously, the U.S. captured Maduro. And I think a lot of people assumed that this effort, this pressure on the ships would stop. But instead, it's actually not only continued, but expanded. You are the newsroom's resident expert on these oil tankers. You've been tracking all of this as part of our visual investigations team. So let's start at the very beginning.
What is a ghost fleet or shadow fleet?
That's a very good question. Besides shadow fleet and ghost fleet, there's a third term, which is dark fleet. So it's interesting because there's not a well-defined definition. It's basically a term for oil tankers that use deceptive practices to kind of hide that they're transporting sanctioned oil.
oil that's sanctioned by the United States, and these ships want to hide that they're picking up this oil and delivering this oil. Why do I know a lot about it? It's because that after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022, there was this same sudden surge in interest, like Ghost Fleet, Dark Fleet, Shadow Fleet. And my manager asked me, like, Chris, can you find out
What are actually the ships of this fleet? So that's how it started for me. But there are hundreds of tankers, maybe even thousands. We don't really know. And basically, these tankers are shipping sanctioned Russian oil or sanctioned Iranian oil and Venezuelan oil. They're always shipping oil for either of these three countries and sometimes for all three.
Most of the oil goes to China and a significant portion goes to India as well. And these ships have decided to do that. There's a lot of money to make if you're shipping sanctioned oil. And they're trying to hide that.
Got it. Okay. So do you have any sense, given the fact that this is literally called a shadow fleet, of how much of the world's oil is transported this way? Yeah.
It's hard to say, right, because they're obviously trying to deceive everyone that they're actually shipping this oil. But it's probably around like 10 to 20 percent of oil tankers worldwide that have engaged in this kind of activity, which is quite a bit.
But given it's only related to Russia, Iran and Venezuela, the share of the oil on the world market is about three to nine percent, according to the data that's available.
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Chapter 3: What are ghost fleets and how do they operate?
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Christiane, before the break, you described this kind of cat and mouse game that the U.S. has been playing with these ships and this question of whether the U.S. will ultimately be successful in enforcing its sanctions, specifically with these 16 oil tankers, which, as you described, seem to have just sort of disappeared from Venezuelan waters.
You had mentioned that you and our colleagues wanted to set out to find out where they'd gone. Tell us how you started doing that.
Yeah, so these ships engage in a lot of deceptive practices. And because they use these deceptive techniques, it's pretty hard. But if you know where to look, you can get some pretty good clues. Well, how do you even know where to look? So, for example, every oil tanker needs to send out a location signal, which is for safety.
They're very big and, you know, if they don't send out a location signal and another ship doesn't see them in low visibility, for instance, it's going to be a disaster. So... There's an agreement. All the bit large ships should send out this transponder signal. But the transponder signal also allows anyone on the planet to kind of see where these ships are.
There's a website called Marine Traffic. And, you know, you can see thousands of vessels that you can just track in real time. But from all those 16 ships that disappeared from Venezuelan waters, we couldn't track any of them. Why? Because they either switched off their transponder signal
which means going dark, or they faked their location signal to pretend they're actually off the coast of West Africa or Asia, a method that's known as spoofing. They're spoofing their location signal.
Okay, so I understand all of that, I think. It sounds like it's VPN, but for ships, right?
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Chapter 4: What triggered the U.S. military's actions against ghost fleets in December?
I mean, there are not that many insurers in the world that can take this on. And most of these insurance companies are based in Western countries. So what has been happening is that many of the shadow fleet oil tankers are lying because to these insurers when they ask for insurance.
But what has happened recently, maybe partly because of the reporting we did on that, and also just in general and in scrutiny on these ships, these American and Western insurance companies are yanking insurance away from these ships.
So now these ships are getting insurance from less reputable companies or sometimes even companies that may not really exist that are often linked to Russia, which is also pretty scary, right? Because let's say something happens with one of these Shadow Fleet tankers, who the hell is going to pay for it?
Do you have any sense, Christian, as to how this pressure campaign on the shadow fleet might end?
So one striking thing that has happened after Trump met with European leaders at Davos is that Macron tweeted and said, hey, we as France... also stopped and boarded a tanker that was carrying Russian-sanctioned oil.
So that's a striking spillover effect of Trump's gumbo diplomacy, where at least a one-time ally, France, is now doing the same thing as the US is doing, which is stopping and boarding these Shadow Fleet tankers. But also, what I'm looking at right now is at a completely different side of the world, but very much linked, and that's Iran.
President Donald Trump is ramping up pressure on Iran. Yeah, he says big force is heading to the region as the country continues to kill protesters in the streets.
On Thursday night, Trump said that he's moving an armada of military vessels towards the region.
And the next day, on Friday... The Trump administration is issuing new sanctions on Iran's shadow fleet of oil vessels as the president sends Iran a stern warning.
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