Belgium’s special forces boarded and seized an oil tanker from the “shadow fleet” Russia uses to circumvent Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine, the government said on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Prevot said the vessel was intercepted in the North Sea during an overnight operation.<\/p>\n
“Today, a vessel from Russia’s shadow fleet was intercepted in the North Sea,” Prevot wrote on X, thanking Belgian special forces for their “exceptional professionalism and courage.”<\/p>\n
Belgian Defense Minister Theo Francken said the intercepted tanker was “being escorted to the port of Zeebrugge, where it will be seized.”<\/p>\n
Russia has used a flotilla of ageing tankers of opaque ownership to get around restrictions on its lucrative crude exports imposed over its 2022 all-out invasion of Ukraine.<\/p>\n
The European Union has blacklisted hundreds of vessels in a bid to sap Moscow’s war chest.<\/p>\n
“Sanctions only matter if they are enforced. Today, we enforced them,” Prevot said, suggesting the seized ship might have operated under a false flag.<\/p>\n
The operation was carried out alongside Belgium’s G7, Nordic and Baltic partners and in coordination with France, he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Belgium’s special forces boarded and seized an oil tanker from the “shadow fleet” Russia uses to circumvent Western…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4117,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7,3237],"class_list":{"0":"post-4116","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-belgium","8":"tag-belgium","9":"tag-shadow-fleet"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4116\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}