Authorities in Sweden have seized a ship suspected of illegally exporting goods from Russian-occupied Crimea as part of Moscow’s so-called “shadow fleet.”
Swedish prosecutors said on Wednesday that they had taken custody of the Caffa, a vessel first detained in March near Trelleborg on the Baltic coast, on the request of an unnamed third country that is investigating the ship’s activities.
JOIN US ON TELEGRAM
Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.
Although prosecutors did not explicitly link the vessel to Russia, Sweden’s coastguard previously said the ship’s captain was a Russian national suspected of using false documents.
Public broadcaster SVT has reported that the Caffa is suspected of being involved in the illegal export of grain from the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula in southern Ukraine.
Ukrainian authorities are fiercely opposed to such trade, leading local media outlets to speculate that Kyiv may be behind the request to seize the vessel.
Moscow has long been suspected of operating a so-called “shadow fleet” comprising merchant ships sailing under foreign flags in an attempt to bypass international sanctions placed on Russia over its ongoing war in Ukraine.
Such ships have been used to transport sanctioned Russian oil and gas products as well as grain from Crimea – which has been under complete Russian control since 2014 but is still recognized as Ukrainian territory by most of the international community.
Other Topics of Interest
