THE presidents of Ukraine and Panama got together on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week, with the shadow fleet* inevitably the main topic up for discussion.

Jose Raul Mulino assured Volodymyr Zelensky that his country, the world’s largest open registry, had revoked registration of 200 tankers contravening sanctions on the export of Russian crude.

Consoling as Zelensky will have found the affirmation, Panama’s stance will do little to staunch prohibited trade, not just with Russia but with Iran and Venezuela as well.

Attempts to put the guilty operators out of business are proving little more than a game of flag state Whack-A-Mole, with plenty of bottom feeding flags of convenience offering alternative home ports on a no-questions-asked basis.

Even the perennially sea-blind general public is starting to pay attention. The shadow fleet has in recent weeks generated headlines in outlets ranging from the sober Financial Times and The New York Times to sensationalist British tabloid The Sun.

But if you thought our industry’s reputation for all-round lack of ethical backbone couldn’t get any worse, think again.

Although it has yet to attract widespread unfavourable notice, a further challenge to shipping’s integrity is rapidly emerging.

An increasing number of ships are accepting fixtures of (at best) borderline legality.

A case in point is the resumption of containerised trades with Sevastopol and other ports in Russian-occupied Ukraine.

The practice is in obvious contravention of an International Maritime Organization resolution from 2023, which called on member states to instruct ships flying their flags not to do so.

As Lloyd’s List reported this week, Chinese-owned Heng Yang 9 (IMO: 1059979) is a repeat offender on this account. AIS data places it in Sevastopol on at least two occasions in recent months, subsequently sailing for Istanbul in Türkiye.

The Ukrainian government has written a letter of protest to Beijing, rightly emphasising that such actions constitute a violation of its territorial sovereignty.

Heng Yang 9, incidentally, is flagged in Panama. Perhaps Mr Mulino will wish to re-examine its status prior to his next encounter with Zelensky.

Meanwhile, UN Security Council resolution 2146 has for over a decade prohibited the carriage of crude from Libya unless approved by both that country’s legitimate authorities and its National Oil Co.

Breaches of this stipulation nevertheless persist, to the financial benefit of the military strongmen behind the rebel Government of National Stability rather than the officially recognised Government of National Unity. This, in plain words, is oil smuggling.

Developments such as these are not purely a concern for the clearly not-too-troubled consciences of that minority of shipowners willing to turn a blind eye to internationally agreed rules.

Among other issues, it will inevitably entail an upsurge in spoofing. That creates a wider risk to safety at sea for seafarers serving on law-abiding vessels.

It is also set down in black and white in the rulebooks of every International Group P&I club that cover is void for voyages undertaken in breach of sanctions.

Were one of these shipments to result in an oil spill, the clean-up costs would fall to the states most impacted by the resultant slick. Nor would other shipowners be able to lodge a liability claim in the event of collision.

The shadow fleet, in the proper sense of tankers taking bookings for Russia, Iran and Venezuela, increasingly looks more a permanent than transient phenomenon. As new normals go, that is not encouraging news.

But we still lack a general shorthand designation for ships engaged in other illicit activities.

Strictly speaking, it is not possible for a shadow to cast a shadow, ruling out such coinages as the shadow shadow fleet.

But the same object — for instance, a footballer in the centre of a floodlit pitch — can cast multiple shadows, and that is what seems to be happening here.

For want of a better description, what we are witnessing is the emergence of a de facto shadow fleet 2.0.

That can only make an already bad situation worse, inflicting further damage on our industry’s tarnished standing and posing a risk to everybody’s business.

Unless the tendency can somehow be checked, this could prove a public relations disaster in the making.

It is worth noting that shadows only disappear either when there is no longer an object to block the light or when the light source is directly overhead.

If shipping wants to avert any more invasive government scrutiny of what it does, it should stop inviting it.

* Lloyd’s List defines a tanker as being part of the Shadow Fleet if it engages in one or more deceptive shipping practices indicating that it is involved in the facilitation of sanctioned oil cargoes from Iran, Russia or Venezuela. Or it is sanctioned for participation in sanctioned oil trades or is sanctioned for links to a company that is sanctioned for facilitating the export of sanctioned oil.