![COLUMN | No big deal: the fate of officers of the dark tanker fleet (part two of two) [Offshore Accounts]](http://media.assettype.com/bairdmaritime%2F2026-02-25%2Fs4key7fb%2FUntitled.jpeg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
On Monday, we reviewed the boat by boat deals that have dominated the sale and purchase market in offshore these last few months, noting that we were waiting for Tidewater to make a transformative deal in the Americas – a big deal that was duly consummated when the company announced the acquisition of Wilson Sons in Brazil a few hours before my column hit the press.
We observed that, “this was a month of small deals, for others it was simply no big deal.” But for one individual, 2026 has been a very big deal, for him professionally and for the thousands of seafarers who work on the so-called “dark fleet” of tankers engaged in the trading of sanctioned oil from Russia, Venezuela and Iran.
We refer, of course, to the master of the “dark fleet” very large crude carrier (VLCC) built in 2002 and formerly known as Bella 1 when it approached Venezuela in December flying a fake flag of the Guyana registry. The tanker was then known as Marinera, when it abruptly reflagged to Russia after being chased across the Atlantic for two weeks by the US Coast Guard for sanctions violations.
The ship was finally boarded in the Atlantic between Iceland and Scotland by around 48 US Coast Guard officers via eight helicopters on January 7, (video here) and was brought into Scottish waters on January 14, where it anchored off Burghead in the Moray Firth, near the town of Elgin.
It seems to remain there today, although it is not clear who is manning the vessel now, or how the empty tanker will be removed and scrapped, or sold, nor who is paying the insurance and the agency fees. The moment the ship arrived in Scotland under US Coast Guard control, media interest in the case apparently died.
But for the crew on board, the drama was not over. They received no consular assistance. Of course, they were not paid their January wages. Of course, the mysterious “logistics manager” named Kirill, who was directing the voyage of the vessel, suddenly vanished. Of course, the Ukrainian crew managers at the agency Zolos Shipping and its partner agency C-Wave, which had hired the crew, deleted their chats with the sailors.
Zolos seems to be Zolos Shipping, which has frequently advertised full crew positions on tankers at various maritime job websites (such as here, here and here). C-Wave reportedly has offices in Moldova and, according to the Ukrainian press, both companies are linked to former Odesa MP Viktor Baransky, a Russian national who was stripped of his citizenship in Ukraine and is a fugitive from justice after fraudulently chartering then stealing 32 vessels from a Ukrainian state river shipping company in 2017.
Intent newspaper claims that a Moldovan relative of the former deputy founded Zolos Shipping, which recruits crews for sanctioned vessels.
Exiled Russian reporters for Verstka have documented the stories of the Marinera crew, who were permitted to leave the ship at the end of January.
There were 28 crew on the vessel when it was boarded by the US Coast Guard. Two Russian seafarers went home to Moscow, while 11 Ukrainian crew flew to countries outside their homeland, including Moldova. Another five Ukrainians informed the journalist Anastasia Korotkova that they would voluntarily go to the United States to testify in court against the vessel’s master and mate.
Another five Georgians and three Indians from the crew are believed to have returned to their home countries after being processed in a British military facility in Inverness. They were assured that the US Government would not press any charges against them, one of Verstka’s sources told the reporter.
The crew vociferously maintain their innocence. They say they had no idea the tanker was heading for Venezuela, and when they did so, 23 of the 28 crew members apparently signed a statement requesting that they be replaced “due to life-threatening and legal risks.”
This may be true, but they can hardly have not known that the ship was suspect. CSIS has documented its numerous suspicious activities
The fate of the final two senior deck officers – Marinera’s master, the Georgian national Avtandil Kalandadze, and his chief mate, 46-year old Ukrainian citizen Oleksandr Raskovskyy – was not initially clear. They were arrested and taken out of Scotland aboard a US Coast Guard cutter on January 27.
Captain Kalandadze’s wife and his lawyer had tried to obtain an order in a local court barring the captain’s removal from Scotland. Their lawyers obtained the order, but by then, the two officers had been whisked out of the country by the American Government, so the order could not be enforced.
For a few weeks, there was then a resounding silence. Then finally last week, public court filings emerged revealing that Captain Kalandadze has been charged on two counts in the United States.
The first count accuses him of sailing Marinera under a false flag. The vessel, like many dark fleet ships, purported to fly the flag of Guyana. Unfortunately, the flag was false, as the ship was not in fact legally registered in Guyana.
Guyana has been subject to many false flag claims since Captain Suniel Kumar Sharma set up a private company called the International Maritime Safety Agency of Guyana (IMSAG), which was contracted by the Guyanese Government in 2021 to act as an open shipping register for the oil-rich country.
Six months later, the agreement was terminated by the authorities in Georgetown, but a Bellingcat investigation has found certificates issued to tankers by IMSAG as recently as December 2025.
It is clear that claiming false Guyanese registration is common amongst dark fleet tankers.
Marinera is the not the first falsely Guyanese-flagged dark fleet tanker to be in trouble with the authorities, although the captain of Nora can thank his lucky stars that the Malaysian authorities are considerably kinder than the Americans have been to Captain Kalandadze.
At the end of January, the sanctioned tanker Nora was detained by the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) for having engaged in an unauthorised ship-to-ship transfer off Penang. The ship was flying a false Guyana flag as per The Straits Times.
The vessel with which Nora was engaged performing the unauthorised ship-to-ship transfer was Cameroon-registered Rcelebra (actual spelling), which has been under European Union sanctions since February 2025. Both captains and 53 members of the crew of the two vessels were held on board.
The cargo of crude oil was valued at more than MYR512 million (US$130 million), according to the MMEA. Given the known risk of pollution from badly maintained and illegally flagged vessels, the Malaysian authorities took the unusual decision to release both tankers at the start of the month. The owners were simply fined the maximum penalty of MYR300,000 (US$76,000) for the unauthorised ship-to-ship transfer.
Like Bellingcat, we should emphasise, of course, that there is no indication that Captain Sharma or IMSAG knowingly issued flags to criminal actors, and we do not know what certificates Bella-1 had on board when she was first hailed by the US Coast Guard off Venezuela on December 20 before she was renamed Marinera.
Since the vessel had no valid flag, which Guyana has confirmed, it will be hard for the master to defend himself on this first charge.
The second charge alleges that the master failed to obey an order from the US Coast Guard to stop the tanker and allow American forces to board it. This is where the effectively flagless nature of Bella-1, as the ship was then named, comes into play. The US Coast Guard has every right to board “stateless” vessels, those ships without nationality that do not fly a valid flag, or those that fail to claim a valid nationality when asked.
Evading the US Coast Guard for two weeks and refusing to answer the radio whilst being chased with the vessel tracking switched off does not look like an innocent mistake to my untrained eye.
We are not clear where the two officers are now, whether they have legal representation, and in what conditions they are being held, or why. If Mr Raskovskyy is not being charged, then he should be released.
We wrote to the Scottish lawyers acting for Natia Dzadzama, the wife of captain Avtandil Kalandadze, to request an update on his whereabouts and situation, but we did not receive a response.
You probably believe that Captain Kalandadze has brought this on himself as master of a vessel clearly flying a fake flag, who tried to evade the US Coast Guard in a chase across the Atlantic.
However, America is a country built on law and a constitution. Two ship’s officers should not simply disappear from a vessel in UK waters for nearly a month without being charged by the Department of Justice. If they have done wrong, they should be tried in a public court via a legal process, openly and transparently. If they cannot be charged, then they should be released and allowed to return to their families.
I am pleased Captain Kalandadze has been charged as it provides due process.
One of the seafarers on Marinera interviewed by Verstka said he had signed on to the ship for good money and supposedly rapid career advancement.
“I didn’t understand at all where I was going, what kind of company this was," the Ukrainian crew member told Ms Korotkova. "They offered me a good salary, a good contract, and a good ship. It’s very promising."
Instead, he ended up lying in the doorway of his cabin with his hands in the air as armed US Coast Guard officers seized the ship and locked the crew in the mess for a week. He wasn’t paid his wages for January and now has the stain of the name of Marinera in his discharge book.
Whilst the crew claim their innocence, it would be fair to say that Ukrainian public opinion has judged them as greedy traitors, seafaring Judases who knew that they were working to aid Ukraine’s enemies for their own private gain.
Comments under the Suspilne News video on YouTube show that, for most Ukrainians, these seafarers bring the whole profession into disrepute:
"They knew everything, understood everything!"
"These 'sailors' knew perfectly well where, what kind of company and for whom they worked..."
"These are not the first and not the last Ukrainians who have exchanged their dignity for rubles, unfortunately, that is why we have been fighting for so long and so many deaths."
"I think our sailors knew it all"
"They are traitors. There should be no shades in such cases. Either white or black."
"I don't believe they didn't know what they were carrying..."
"Human dignity is very expensive."
"They all need to be tried, and they were released. Now they are sailing on another ship of the same kind – a whirlwind of sh*t in nature... Impunity breeds even greater evil."
"I hope the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine, ed] knows their names!"
A similar fate to that of Marinera's master awaits the captain of the suspected dark fleet tanker Grinch, which Reuters reported was released from French custody on February 17 after nearly three weeks of detention at Marseille, following the payment of a multimillion-euro penalty by its owners for certification and flag state documentation violations.
The ship was bound on a laden voyage from Murmansk in northern Russia through the Mediterranean whilst flying (surprise) a false Comoros flag. The French authorities diverted the ship to the anchorage in Marseille and began an investigation into alleged sanctions breaches.
The master of the vessel, an unnamed 58-year old Indian national, was arrested by the French authorities on charges relating to his refusal to cooperate with the investigation and for his involvement in the registration irregularities. He is in detention and is scheduled to stand trial later this month. Two cases in two separate states starts to look like a trend (and a welcome one).
Last Tuesday, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Grinch was leaving French waters, "after paying several million euros and three weeks of costly immobilisation," as per Euronews. Malaysia might want to compare the penalties it collected with France’s princely sum.
"Bypassing European sanctions comes at a price," the minister wrote in a social media post. "Russia will no longer be able to fund its war with impunity via a ghost fleet off our coasts."
As usual, the beneficiaries of Russia’s multi-billion dollar oil exports continue to enjoy the benefits with impunity. Ukrainian civilians bear a terrible price from the continuation of the war.
If there were no crew willing to work on the dark fleet, those Russian oil exports would stop. Maybe Ukrainian crew and other seafarers should be thinking twice before accepting lucrative contracts on vessels like Marinera and Grinch and the hundreds of sanctioned dark fleet ships.
The slogan, “No shipping, no shopping,” is a powerful reminder of dependence of global consumers on the maritime industry.
A better slogan might be, “No crew, no dark fleet.”
Think twice before you sign on to a potential dark fleet ship. The website sketchy.boats has a full listing of the dodgiest tankers in the global fleet. Steer clear, but if you want to take Mr Putin’s thirty pieces of silver working on a dark fleet tanker, beware that there may be consequences.
The pressure against the dark fleet has been stepped up. After the charges against the Marinera and Grinch masters, nobody can claim that they do not know the risks of signing onto a dark fleet ship.
The money may be nice transporting Russian oil, but there is an applicable adage I am probably not allowed to utter in these august pages, so I direct you here.
