Thread by @willydunn

A short thread about a ship: this is Magnus, currently entering the English Channel off the Kent coast. There is a lot we don't know about Magnus...

We don't know who her beneficial owners are. We don't know if she is insured. She sails under the flag of Liberia, but this is a fiction - she was not built in Liberia and may never have docked there.

What we do know is that Magnus is carrying hundreds of thousands of barrels of Russian oil, loaded at Primorsk on the Baltic coast.
Magnus is one of nearly 600 "dark fleet" ships that take Russia's oil to refineries in Asia.

This is the trade that pays for Putin's war. It sails within spitting distance of our coast on almost a daily basis.

How did this dark fleet appear? With the help of shipbrokers, lawyers and insurers in the City of London. newstatesman.com/the-weekend-re…

What are the consequences? The big one is that in 2022 Russia had a budget surplus of $222bn. Its military budget for the year was $75bn.

But we should also ask what would happen if Magnus ran aground or struck another vessel.

This isn't all that unlikely because dark fleet ships are old (Magnus is 17, and did almost 140,000 miles last year) and do risky things like turning off the transponders that show others where they are.

Who would pay to clean hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from English beaches? Liberia? Russia? Not likely. And the companies running these ships are little more than a stack of bearer shares in a safe somewhere.

But there are British companies making good money (tens of millions in additional profit, in some cases) from this still-growing fleet. Here's how it happens. newstatesman.com/the-weekend-re…