Russian oil tankers go dark, evading name-and-shame Twitter bot

First there was the Russian jet tracker, then there was the Russian yacht tracker, and now there is the Russian oil tanker tracker.

The data scientists at Greenpeace UK created an automated bot that uses public data to communicate about the movements of oil and gas tanker leaving Russian ports. The goal is to cut off one of Russia's main revenue sources that is helping fuel the war in Ukraine.

About 40 percent of Russia's federal budget relies on fossil fuel royalties, which means that tanker fulfilling contracts are contributing to Russia's war machine. To shame companies and countries into not buying oil and gas from the country, Greenpeace is using the origin, identity, and destination of tanker ships that have docked at Russian ports.

“That’s a really important hypocrisy to highlight politically,” Georgia Whitaker, an oil campaigner at Greenpeace UK, told Protocol. “Politicians are saying all the right things, but they’re not necessarily putting that into action.”

Activists diverted the tanker that was headed for Sweden, according to the group.

The shipments are not illegal yet. On March 11, just days after President Joe Biden announced an executive order banning imports of Russian oil and gas, Australia announced it would do the same. The executive order gave existing orders 45 days to complete delivery and banned new contracts immediately. The UK government will phase out the purchase of Russian fossil fuels by the end of the year. No EU countries have banned Russian oil or gas.

Using public data

The industry tends to operate out of public view, but the bot gives unprecedented transparency. MarineTraffic is the shipping equivalent of a flight- tracking website. The site uses an automated identification system that all large ships are required to use.

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It is intended to be a navigation aid. Ships broadcast their locations. The signals can be picked up by other vessels within a 23 mile area. Rate of turn, pitch and roll are some of the sensor data that can be broadcasted. Financial data sources like Refinitiv and Bloomberg are used by data scientists from the group.

The tracker can determine which ships have docked at Russian ports, announce updates to their routes, and reveal where they are headed based on their reported destination.

Even though the tracker has all the data, it's not as easy to track oil tanker as it is to track airplanes. Sometimes those routes change for a variety of reasons, such as the price of oil or gas, or they may have left port without a destination in the first place.

Running dark

The tanker bot faces a new challenge, though, one that governments enforcing sanctions will also struggle to surmount. Windward, an Israeli maritime risk consultancy, says that at least 33 Russian tankers turned off their AIS transponders last week, twice the average rate over the past year, according to a Bloomberg report. Most “dark” operations occurred near Russian shores. In some cases, Windward followed ships as they loitered next to other tankers for a few hours, potentially transferring oil from one to the other.

This behavior is not new. The US Treasury Department said that Russian ships were turned off their transponders to deliver oil to Syria.

International maritime law requires commercial vessels to keep their transponders on while at sea, and while that may not prevent captains or owners intent on breaking the law, it does help narrow the search for ships participating in illegal activities.