Since sanctions were imposed on Russia following its attack on Ukraine in February 2022, many have asked the question: Why does Russia still seem to be able to sell natural resources such as oil and natural gas without much trouble? One reason is the growing “shadow fleet” of Russian ships carrying cargo between Russian ports and the outside world. According to a report by the Atlantic Council, the fleet included up to 1,400 ships in January 2024.
In classical theories of navigation, the world’s oceans have been alternatively perceived as both free and closed. In his 1609 book Mare liberum (The Free Sea), the Dutchman Hugo Grotius wrote about the sea as a common space in which no prince could rule over the free seafarer. A few years later, in 1633, the Englishman John Selden challenged this idea of the sea as a kind of commonwealth in his work Mare clausum (The Closed Sea). In stark contrast to Grotius, Selden envisioned the world’s oceans as a battleground for geopolitical conflicts and commercial competition, a domain where the strong ruled. In which sea, the free or enclosed, does the Russian shadow fleet sail?
Before we can address the question, some facts need to be established. First of all, what exactly is meant by a “shadow fleet”? How do we know one exists to begin with? At the time of writing, two sources of data seem to be the primary source for answering this question.
The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is a transponder system that uses VHF radio to transmit data packets from a ship, including information about its name, position, destination, speed, etc. AIS data can be read by other ships, but also by satellites that collect AIS data on a global scale. According to the 1974 SOLAS Convention, all large ships must send an AIS signal. Even before the war in Ukraine, some researchers estimated that up to 40% of ships that should be using an AIS transponder were either not sharing AIS data at all or were sending falsified AIS records. Both methods are standard practice within the Russian shadow fleet. Earlier this year, hundreds of ships in the fleet gave their position as the Moscow airfield, far from the nearest port.
In addition to AIS, some researchers have recently relied on satellite imagery analyzed by remote sensing. A research group led by Andrej Androjna at the University of Ljubljana used a combination of AIS and data from two satellites in the European Copernicus program (which, by the way, offers the best open satellite data to the general public) to map how Russian ships in waters near Greece and Romania received oil from Russian ships and then passed it on to ships that could sail on without being traced back to Russian ports.
A maritime interpreter of both Grotius and Selden was the German jurist Carl Schmitt, (in)famous for his cynical but often lucid geopolitical analyses. In several works, Schmitt described the relationship between sea and land as the foundation of the prevailing international order, a kind of nomos from which all other rules emerged. In his book Land und Meer, published while he was courting German Nazism, Schmitt describes the sea as the domain where the rigid division of land into territories under nation-states was entirely absent. On the seas, Britain, the dominant maritime power for much of the modern era, ruled, in contrast to the continental Großraum (Great Space) project that Germany pursued, particularly after Hitler came to power. Based on this contradiction, Schmitt portrayed the British version of international law as a kind of false universalism with no reverence for borders between states and peoples. In a worthwhile article, political scientist Joshua Derman describes how the sea thus became for Schmitt a kind of proxy for his critique of the League of Nations, an attack on liberal aspirations for a world based on inter-state dialogue instead of open and frank conflict.
Based on Schmitt, Alexander Dugin, the well-known radical right-wing theorist with close ties to the Putin regime, today advocates a continental “Eurasian” project for Russia as a competitor to three other “Great Spaces” – the United States, Asia around China, and Europe. Political scientist David Lewis argues that the United States in particular emerges in Dugin’s work as a representative of the maritime universalism that Russia opposes.
There is something remarkable in the fact that the world’s oceans are the arena where Russia can challenge the trade embargo from the West. If we take Schmitt’s theories seriously, the very idea of neutral international waters is grounded in Western liberalism and internationalism. Russia is using the rules-based international order to undermine the maritime “civilization” – represented by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – that is also the primary guarantor of this order. The chaos in the world’s oceans is both the effect and a cause of the faltering international order.
That is why the West cannot intervene on the seas, because to do so would undermine the mare liberum and the international order. So how does it respond? Neither on land nor water, but to some extent in the air. In satellite imagery of the Russian shadow fleet, the air appears almost as a proxy for liberal ideals of transparency. If the sea is the public space of the international arena, the air is the principle of open communication.
Ironically, Schmitt ridiculed liberalism precisely because it replaced political conflict with endless conversation without real stakes. On some level, the appeals to the AIS system and the scrutiny of shipping traffic through satellite data seem to prove him right. They are technocratic responses to an intractable geopolitical conflict. But that’s how liberalism works. The Russian shadow fleet may sail the mare liberum, but it might just bring about a new mare clausum.