The oil sanctions leaving sailors adrift
Marketplace Morning Report
Marketplace
4.5 • 927 Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
From the BBC World Service: Sanctions on the export of Russian oil have left many ships stuck at sea, unable to unload their cargoes. Today, we speak with a captain of an oil container ship that's part of Russia’s shadow oil export fleet. His ship and the crew are stranded, unable to sell or offload their ship's oil. Then, we head to Slovakia, which manufactures more cars per capita than any other country in the world.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The oil sanctions leaving sailors cut adrift live from the UK. This is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Stuart Clarkson. Good morning. The US has been clamping down on the shadow fleet, aging merchant ships which are used to evade international sanctions by transporting illicit goods. Russia is accused of using ships like these to make money by selling sanctioned oil. |
| 0:24.7 | The International Transport Workers Federation says the rise in the shadow fleet could be fueling a surge in something called seafarer abandonment, |
| 0:31.9 | where crew are left stranded without food and pay. |
| 0:34.6 | There can be other reasons too, like geopolitical instability or if an operator goes bust. |
| 0:39.4 | This happened to 410 ships last year, up by a third, leaving more than 6,200 seafarers stranded. |
| 0:46.1 | The BBC's David Waddell has spoken to one sailor still aboard his stranded oil tanker. |
| 0:50.7 | We're not identifying the location of the ship or the name of the captain. |
| 1:00.4 | He was on a shadow fleet vessel. He's a senior officer on a mid-sized oil tanker flying a false Gambian flag, essentially unregistered. And I understand this is the world first broadcast interview |
| 1:06.7 | from a shadow fleet vessel. He told me about the conditions he and his crew are experiencing. |
| 1:12.1 | We're still at anchor out of port limit, still waiting. Also, we have problem with dependent |
| 1:18.1 | celery. It's not transferring with more than two months. Now we already receive for the |
| 1:23.2 | November and I'm waiting on this week for December. We have shortage with meat, grain, fish, |
| 1:29.2 | these simple things for surviving, we have shortages, you know. This is effective on our health, |
| 1:35.0 | on our operational atmosphere. So crew was hungry, crew was angry, and we tried to survive |
| 1:40.9 | only day by day. So we spoke for about 10 minutes and then his internet connection cut off so he was not |
| 1:47.8 | just short of food but also short of data. |
| 1:51.5 | So what about the cargo? Why can't they get it delivered? |
| 1:54.4 | This ship's carrying 100,000 tonnes of oil, nearly three quarters of a million barrels. |
| 2:02.5 | Ordinarily that would be worth around 47 million US dollars, but it's Russian sanctioned oil. In effect, it's untradable. |
| 2:09.5 | And as we've seen over the past couple of months, the US is getting much more proactive |
| 2:13.8 | about tracking down Shadow Fleet ships like this. They can't just dump the oil. |
| 2:18.9 | They can't sell it either. |
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