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Unmasking Russia!

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U.S. Targets Russia’s Shadow Fleet and Humiliates Moscow at Sea

Olga Lautman Jan 12

A crude oil tanker named the Bella 1 and later the Marinera was seized by U.S. forces on Wednesday. The tanker is seen here in a photo taken aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Munro. U.S. European Command

Last week marked an unexpected shift in U.S. enforcement against Russia’s shadow fleet, when American forces boarded and seized several vessels, including the tanker Olina, formerly Minerva M, after it departed Venezuela under a false East Timor flag, marking the fifth interdiction in a matter of days. The move raised an obvious question: why Trump, long known for his loyalty toward Moscow, suddenly authorized direct action against Russian-linked ships.

That shift had already become deeply embarrassing for Moscow days earlier, when U.S. forces seized the oil tanker Bella 1, renamed Marinera by Russia, roughly 190 miles south of Iceland in the North Atlantic under a federal court warrant for sanctions violations tied to Venezuelan oil exports, even though Russian naval vessels, including at least one submarine, were providing escort at the time. Around the same period, U.S. forces also seized the tanker M/T Sophia in the Caribbean, making clear this was not an isolated incident but part of a coordinated campaign to disrupt illicit oil flows.

What set the Marinera episode apart was Russia’s response. Instead of disengaging once the U.S. pursuit began in December, Moscow reflagged the ship as Russian while it was already under chase, issuing a temporary registration without inspection, declaring the vessel protected Russian territory, and dispatching naval forces to escort it. Russian officials simultaneously requested that the United States halt the pursuit, delivering a formal appeal late on New Year’s Eve to both the State Department and the White House’s Homeland Security Council.

The request was ignored, and U.S. forces boarded the vessel anyway. Russian naval escorts watched and did nothing, after which Moscow lost contact with the ship and pivoted to legal protests and appeals to international law—a familiar pattern of frantic face-saving once their bluff collapsed.

For the international community, the scene was impossible to miss. Russian warships and a submarine lingered in the background as U.S. forces boarded and escorted away the tanker. At the same time, humiliated Russian officials insisted that Marinera was flying the Russian flag “in accordance with Russian law and international maritime law” and accused Washington of illegal force, even as U.S. authorities continued to call the vessel Bella 1, flatly refusing to recognize a re-registration that followed an earlier false Guyana flag already marked as invalid in international shipping databases.

The drama deepened as ownership details became public. Documents show the tanker had been sold in December to Burevestmarine, a Russian company registered in the Ryazan region only months earlier and founded in July 2025 by Ilya Bugai, a businessman originally from illegally occupied Crimea, placing the vessel squarely under Russian jurisdiction and eliminating any plausible claim that Moscow was dealing with an unaffiliated or ambiguous asset.

Reporting shows Bugai now lives in Moscow and has run oil trading operations that slid into losses as sanctions tightened, while job listings posted by Burevestmarine in 2025 point to an active maritime operation rather than a paper shell, underscoring that this was a deliberately assembled component of Russia’s sanctions evasion schemes.

As the seizures unfolded, rhetoric in Moscow escalated sharply. State Duma figures and Kremlin propagandists dropped legal arguments and moved straight to threats, branding the boardings “piracy,” invoking military doctrine, and warning of “retaliation,” with television pundits confidently explaining how U.S. vessels could be disabled or sunk, all while, in reality, Russian warships and a submarine sat close enough to watch the seizure and did nothing.

The Kremlin itself remained conspicuously silent throughout the episode. Despite Russian naval vessels and at least one submarine operating nearby, Moscow issued no meaningful directives and took no visible action as U.S. helicopters descended, boarding teams deployed, and a tanker the Russian government had just declared sovereign territory was escorted away without resistance, exposing weeks of threats about escalation and deterrence as little more than performative theater aimed at a domestic audience.

Inside Russia, that gap between rhetoric and reality has not gone unnoticed. On Telegram, military propagandists reacted with open mockery, asking why Russian warships failed to protect a tanker the state had just claimed as its own and repeating with heavy irony the line that circulated after the U.S. operation in Venezuela: “this is what a real special operation looks like,” a phrase that now reads less as commentary on American power than as an indictment of Russia’s inability to act.

Several bloggers fixated on the small but telling details—the Russian flag hastily painted mid-voyage, the registry that appeared overnight, the submarine escort that accomplished nothing—details that cut directly against years of propaganda claiming Russian flags and force create untouchable zones wherever they appear. This was not a covert interdiction or a deniable encounter but a very public seizure carried out under court authority in international waters, effectively under the noses of Russian forces that chose not to act.

The unease beneath the sarcasm is that Russia’s shadow fleet has long been used for more than oil. Bella 1 has been under U.S. sanctions since June 2024 for transporting cargo linked to Hezbollah and previously operated through ownership structures tied to Iran’s Quds Force. Tanker tracking data shows the vessel moved millions of barrels of Iranian oil before being redirected toward Venezuelan routes, reinforcing concerns that these ships function less as commercial tankers than as multipurpose logistics platforms for sanctioned states and armed groups.

Those concerns sharpened after the December 2024 sinking of the Russian cargo vessel Ursa Major in the Mediterranean Sea. A Spanish investigation, reported by La Verdad, concluded that the ship was transporting a covert strategic payload linked to nuclear technology, specifically two VM-4SG nuclear reactor housings, a Soviet-era design still used in Russian submarines and widely believed to have been destined for North Korea.

Spanish authorities reported unusual activity following the sinking, including the appearance of a Russian landing ship that attempted to push Spanish vessels away from the site, and later the arrival of Russia’s oceanographic vessel Yantar. Seismographic instruments recorded vibrations consistent with an underwater explosion at the time Ursa Major went down, intensifying scrutiny over whether the vessel was deliberately scuttled to prevent inspection or recovery.

The Marinera episode represents a clear humiliation for Moscow: a Russian-owned tanker, publicly claimed as sovereign territory, tied to Iranian and Venezuelan sanctions-evasion schemes, escorted by Russian naval assets, seized anyway, followed by threats of retaliation that produced no action at all. Watching a Russian warship hover uselessly in the background as U.S. forces boarded was yet another reminder that Moscow’s pattern is familiar—loud warnings, dramatic theatre, and then nothing—which makes it increasingly difficult to understand why anyone in the international community still treats Russia’s threats as anything more than noise.

The unresolved question now is not whether Russia has been revealed for what it is, but whether the international community will finally recognize that Moscow’s threats amount to little more than bluster and shift toward collective resolve—or whether this will prove to be just another brief pause before caution and ambiguity quietly return.

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