The Border Service and the FSB detained a Ukrainian ghost ship in the Black Sea
The Ukrainian oil tanker Smolny was dubbed a ghost for good reason: for three years, without ever visiting any port since 2012 and without obeying anyone, it sold smuggled diesel fuel on the high seas. Today, he was discovered and detained in Russian territorial waters by the patrol ship Izumrud.
Subscribe to PolitNavigator – Kyiv news on Facebook , Odnoklassniki , or VKontakte
This was reported by the website of the online newspaper “Our Version”.
There was no captain on board the ghost ship - only a crew of 10 Ukrainian citizens. The border guards did not find any official documentation or an automated identification system, with the help of which port services learn about the location of the ship. But in the holds of the Smolny there were over a thousand tons of fuel oil and more than 160 tons of uncertified diesel fuel.
Official Kyiv has so far reacted with restraint to the message about the arrest of the Smolny tanker: as the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry stated, “the information is being verified.”
But as the Crimean border department of the FSB reports, this year alone the tanker violated the legislation on the state border 7 times (Article 9 of the Law “On the State Border of the Russian Federation”), entering the territorial waters of Russia without permission from the border authorities.
Currently, the arrested tanker is in the port of Kerch. The owner of Smolny, the Kerch company Yuvas-trans, according to Article 18.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation, faces at least a fine of over three million rubles.
Border Guards and the FSB detained a Ukrainian ghost ship in the Black Sea.