Three tankers carrying over 2 million barrels of Russian oil have been refused permission to dock at ports in China and are currently idling some distance off the country’s coastline in the Yellow Sea, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
The Huihai Pacific, which sails under the flag of Panama, left the Russian port of Kozmino at the beginning of the month carrying about 770,000 tons of oil and had been due to arrive in the port of Dongjiakou, in China’s eastern Shandong province, on 15 January.
The Mermar, also registered in Panama, and the Olia, sailing under the flag of Gabon, were heading towards the port of Yantai, also in Shandong, carrying 755,000 and 709,000 tons of oil respectively, according to Bloomberg.
All three tankers were added to an updated list of US-sanctioned vessels on Friday, after the US Treasury Department determined that all three of them were part of Russia’s “shadow fleet”, which has increasingly been used by Moscow to export oil despite sanctions.
The new round of sanctions have been described as the toughest yet imposed on Russian energy companies since the start of the war in Ukraine, and led the Shandong Port Group, which runs ports in the province, to refuse the docking and unloading of oil from sanctioned tankers on Wednesday in anticipation of the new measures.
Bloomberg also reported that another Russian tanker, the Cool Rover, was currently idling off the coast of Portugal with a shipment of natural gas from the Gazprom-owned Portovaya Liquid Natural Gas Terminal in northwestern Russia’s Leningrad region, which was also added to the list of entities under US sanctions on Friday.
