Finland is investigating an incident with a tanker in the port of Ust-Luga and is looking for fuel oil in the bay

The Border Service of Finland announced the beginning of their own investigation of the incident with the Koala tanker in the port of Ust-Luga in the Leningrad Region. Border intelligence aircraft were sent to the Gulf of Finland, the department said.

According to the Sunday evening, the border service employees did not find signs of oil products entering the water of the Gulf of Finland.

The authorities of Finland, against the background of reports of an emergency with a tanker, strengthened their readiness to respond to oil spills. This was stated by the Prime Minister of Finland Peteri Orpo.

The incident with the Koala tanker, on board of which, according to the media, more than a hundred thousand tons of fuel oil, occurred on February 9, when he was at the pier for bulk ships in the port of Ust-Luga in the Leningrad Region.

The Rosmorrechflot confirmed that an explosion occurred in the machine department. Russian sources and the media claim that no one was injured, and the spill of oil products is not recorded.

Tanker "shadow fleet"

The Koala tanker is included in the list of the Russian "shadow fleet", the courts of which is helped by Moscow to circumvent sanctions. This conclusion was reached by the publication "Agency".

The list was made by the Greenpeace International Ecological Organization. According to her, technical malfunctions had already occurred on the tanker, and the crew turned off the automatic identification system during the flight through the Baltic Sea.

According to the Magicport portal, the ship was built in 2003 in Korea. It changed the name and owners several times. In 2024, the tanker went under various flags: Panama, Liberia, Palau, Antigua and Barbuda. In Ust-Luga, the ship arrived from Singapore on February 6.

Earlier, the Virtsta publication drew attention to the fact that the Koala tanker is related to a citizen of Latvia Alexei Halyavin. According to The Insider, the companies associated with it became one of the largest buyers of Russian oil bypassing the ceiling of prices.

• "Shadow fleet" is a measure to bypass sanctions for countries that are prohibited from trade in oil. According to the European Commission, the shadow fleet includes old vessels that belong to unknown owners or structures hiding the beneficiaries and which participate in the trade in oil that falls under the sanctions using various fraudulent methods. This is mainly a complex network of "processing companies" for which ships are registered.
• According to Atlantic Council, almost three quarters of Russian oil supplies are carried out using the "shadow fleet". With the help of data manipulation, these vessels hide the origin of their cargo.