French police have arrested the captain and first officer of a Russian “shadow fleet” oil tanker that was seized off the French coast, as they investigate whether it was involved in last week’s drone incursions in Denmark.
Stephane Kellenberger, a prosecutor in the western French city of Brest, said on Thursday that the two men are accused of failing to prove the ship’s nationality and disobeying orders, with their detention extended.
The tanker carrying Russian crude oil was sailing off the coast of Denmark at around the time of the drone incursions, which began last Monday and led to the closure of several Danish airports.
Western officials believe the vessel is part of Russia’s shadow fleet, a group of ageing boats used by Russian companies to ship oil products around the world while circumventing Western sanctions.
“Thanks to our navy commandos and to the crews of the French navy who intervened this weekend on board a Russian shadow fleet tanker, currently anchored off Saint-Nazaire,” French prime minister Sebastien Lecornu wrote on X (Twitter).
“Their action contributed to the arrest of two members of its crew.”
French soldiers boarded the ship several days ago at the request of prosecutors who suspected wrongdoing, officials said on Wednesday. The prosecutor’s office in Brest said an investigation was opened into the crew’s “refusal to cooperate” and “failure to justify the nationality of the vessel”.
French naval forces boarded the ship again on Wednesday to provide food and fuel to the crew aboard, a military official told Associated Press.
The tanker known as “Pushpa” or “Boracay”, whose name has changed several times, was sailing under the flag of Benin and appears on a list of ships targeted by EU sanctions against Russia. It was on its way to India from Russia’s Baltic Sea port of Primorsk, according to the Marine Traffic monitoring website.
French president Emmanuel Macron suggested the tanker was stopped due to an “intervention” by French authorities.
“I think it’s a good thing that this work has been done and that we’ve been able to stop it,” he said on the sidelines of a summit of EU leaders in Copenhagen, Denmark.
“There were some very serious wrongdoings made by this crew, which is why there are legal proceedings in the case,” he added, without elaborating.
Authorities in Denmark refused to rule out Russian involvement when drone sightings forced Copenhagen airport into shutdown for four hours last week, in what was described as a “serious attack on critical Danish infrastructure”.
When asked whether the ship was connected to drone incidents in Denmark, Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen said she would not comment on specific investigations, but added that the region was “facing a lot of problems with the shadow fleet”.
“That has been the case, especially in the Baltic Sea for quite a long time,” she said. “We are working very closely together to battle this situation.”
Macron said the “notorious shadow fleet”, made up of between “600 and 1,000 ships”, is believed to represent tens of billions of euros of Russia’s budget and finances 40 per cent of its war effort.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia had no information about the ship.
