TESTIMONY: Murmansk and Tuapse, two Russian ports erased from the Western map

What Brussels just shut down

On April 23, 2026, the European Commission announced the adoption of its 20th sanctions package against Russia. Buried in the technical detail of that text, two names stand out to anyone following the war from a desk in Kyiv, Brussels, or Ottawa: Murmansk and Tuapse. These two Russian ports are now formally listed among the banned port infrastructure for vessels linked to Russia's shadow fleet, according to documents published by the European Commission. A third port, this time outside Russia — the Karimun oil terminal in Indonesia — joins the same list, a first for a port located in a third country.

This is not a symbolic line lost in a multi-page press release. It is a geographic lockdown aimed directly at one of the quietest — and most lucrative — links in the financing of Russia's war on Ukraine: the maritime transport of oil. A port that can no longer be touched is a port that loses its commercial value for any shipowner trying to dodge the price cap on Russian oil imposed by the G7 since 2022.

The silent witness to an economic war

I have never been to Murmansk. I have no contact on the docks of Tuapse. What I can state is what the official documents of the European Union say, and what that means concretely for the Kremlin's war machine: every port added to this blacklist is one less logistical node for offloading the oil that Vladimir Putin needs to sell to finance his missiles.

Murmansk, a strategic Arctic port since Soviet times, and Tuapse, an oil terminal on the Black Sea, are not minor ports. They are part of the logistical ecosystem that the shadow fleet — those hundreds of aging tankers, with opaque ownership and flags of convenience — relies on to keep exporting Russian crude despite Western sanctions. According to the European Commission, the EU now lists 632 vessels belonging to this shadow fleet, all subject to a ban on accessing European ports and receiving European services.

I will never claim to have watched a ghost tanker dock in Murmansk. But I know how to read an official press release, and this one says something simple: Europe has stopped settling for merely denouncing Russia's shadow fleet. It is closing doors on it, one at a time, with the bureaucratic slowness typical of Brussels — but also with a consistency that, after twenty sanctions packages, is starting to look less like a diplomatic gesture and more like a siege strategy.

A port born of the Cold War, hit by a hot one

Murmansk is not just any port. Located above the Arctic Circle, it stays ice-free year-round thanks to the North Atlantic Current — a geographic advantage that has made it, for decades, a naval base and strategic export port for the Soviet Union, and later Russia. Part of the hydrocarbons extracted in Western Siberia and the Russian Arctic transit through this region, then move on to Asian markets or, more quietly, to European buyers reluctant to fully sever their energy ties with Moscow.

By banning access to Murmansk for vessels linked to the shadow fleet, the European Union does not shut down the port itself — it has no power to do that, since Russia remains sovereign over its own territory. What it does is ban vessels that have called at that port from accessing European waters, ports, and services. In practice, a tanker that loads at Murmansk now risks becoming persona non grata at any European Union port for its subsequent cargoes. It is a cascading sanction, designed to make every Russian port call more costly than the last.

The cold calculation behind a technical decision

The logic behind this measure has to be understood beyond its bureaucratic surface. The war in Ukraine has now lasted more than four years, and oil remains the main source of foreign currency for Putin's regime. Every barrel sold above the G7 price cap — currently set around 60 dollars — directly finances the Russian war effort. By tightening the noose on export ports, Brussels is trying to make evasion costlier, slower, riskier.

This is not a dramatic victory or a spectacular strike like the ones seen against Russian refineries. It is a quieter, more administrative gesture — but no less real in its medium-term effects. A banned port is delayed revenue. Delayed revenue is a ruble that doesn't become a missile quite as fast.

We often underestimate the reach of decisions that never make the evening news. Yet it is precisely this kind of measure — slow, technical, cumulative — that, after twenty successive sanctions packages, ends up turning the Russian war economy into a system forced to constantly improvise. Brussels is not winning the war at Murmansk. But it is making it a little more expensive, day after day, port after port.

An oil terminal at the heart of an already tense region

Tuapse, on Russia's Black Sea coast, is a far less recognizable port to the general public than Novorossiysk or Sevastopol, but no less central to the architecture of Russian oil exports. The Tuapse terminal has historically handled a significant share of crude shipped from the Caucasus and parts of southern Russia. Its proximity to occupied Crimea and to zones of naval conflict in the Black Sea also makes it a sensitive logistical node on the military front, not just the commercial one.

Adding Tuapse to the list of banned ports fits into a broader logic: methodically tightening the net around the entire Russian Black Sea coastline, a region where Ukraine has, for months, also been running a campaign of naval strikes and drone attacks against oil infrastructure and the shadow fleet itself. European sanctions and Ukrainian military pressure converge, without being formally coordinated, toward the same goal: making the Black Sea inhospitable to Moscow's oil trade.

Pressure stacking on pressure

What stands out in this 20th package is its coherence with the other fronts already opened against the Russian war economy. As Ukraine intensifies its drone strikes against Russian refineries and tankers in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov — a campaign Ukrainian commanders themselves describe as reaching an "industrial scale" — the European Union is simultaneously closing administrative and commercial doors. The two offensives, one military and one regulatory, create a pincer effect on Russia's ability to move its oil.

Tuapse is no longer just another Russian port. It has become one more symbol on a growing list — the list of places where Russia thought it could keep doing business as usual, and which, package after package, are closing one by one.

There is something almost poetic in the fact that two ports so geographically distant — one beyond the Arctic Circle, the other on the Black Sea — end up together on the same line of the same Brussels press release. It says something clear: there is no sanctuary left for the Russian war economy, not in the north, not in the south.

632 vessels and a list that keeps growing

The figure is worth repeating: 632 vessels are now listed by the European Union as part of the Russian shadow fleet, according to the European Commission. That number alone speaks to the scale of the problem Brussels has been trying to solve for years. Every new sanctions package adds dozens more vessels — 46 additional ships were listed in this 20th package alone, along with a major maritime insurer deemed complicit in sanctions evasion.

The shadow fleet is not a fabrication of Western propaganda. It is a documented reality: aging tankers, often near the end of their useful life, bought cheap, registered under flags of convenience, operated by shell companies whose real ownership remains opaque. Their sole mission: transport Russian oil while dodging the G7 price cap and Western insurance restrictions.

Why this fleet worries Western strategists so much

Beyond the purely financial angle, these vessels pose a considerable environmental and security risk. Aging, often poorly maintained, sailing without standard international insurance, they represent a potential oil-spill threat in waters as sensitive as the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, or the Arctic. Several incidents involving vessels from this fleet have already been reported by specialized maritime press in recent years.

It is precisely for this reason that the European Union introduced, in this same package, the legal groundwork for a future full ban on maritime services for the transport of Russian oil and oil products — a measure that, if it comes into force in coordination with the G7 and the price-cap coalition, could entirely replace the current cap system with an outright prohibition.

632 vessels. The number is dizzying once you realize it represents a shadow fleet almost as large as some entire national merchant navies. This is no longer a handful of isolated smugglers — this is a parallel infrastructure, methodically built to keep Putin's regime afloat financially, literally.

Why oil remains the obsession of every sanctions package

It bears repeating, even if it feels like an obvious point rehashed since 2022: oil and gas have historically represented nearly half of Russia's federal budget revenue. Every dollar of oil revenue preserved is a dollar potentially reinjected into the war effort — missile production, drones, soldiers' salaries, weapons purchases from suppliers like Iran or North Korea. This is precisely why nearly every one of the European Union's twenty successive sanctions packages has included a substantial energy component.

The price cap on Russian oil, set by the G7 in December 2022 at 60 dollars a barrel, has had a real but partial effect: it cut into Moscow's margins without eliminating its exports. The shadow fleet was born directly out of that loophole — a way to keep selling above the cap by hiding cargo origin, ownership, and insurance. Closing the ports that serve that fleet is a direct attack on the very tool that allowed the cap to be dodged.

An economic war fought on maritime charts too

What this 20th package reveals is an evolution in European sanctions doctrine: no longer content with targeting individuals, companies, or banks, it now targets physical locations — ports, terminals, entire shipping routes. It is a more granular approach, harder to evade through simple legal restructuring, since it strikes at the very geography of the trade.

This approach converges, without any formal coordination, with the Ukrainian military strategy that targets the same objectives by force rather than by law: refineries, oil terminals, and shadow-fleet tankers themselves, struck directly by drones from Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces in the Sea of Azov in recent weeks. Two different paths, one shared goal: starve Russia's war financing at its source.

I remain convinced that history will remember this period as the one when the West finally understood that you don't fight a war economy with speeches at the Security Council alone. You fight it port by port, ship by ship, with the stubborn patience of a Brussels bureaucrat drafting a twentieth sanctions package without ever tiring of it. It is not glamorous. It is effective, provided the will holds over time.

Evasion and persistent gray zones

It would be dishonest to present this measure as a miracle solution. Western sanctions against Russia, since 2022, have repeatedly shown their capacity to be circumvented — through third countries, shell companies, flag changes, or simply commercial routes redrawn toward Asia. The listing of the Karimun terminal in Indonesia as a banned port for the first time illustrates exactly this problem: the shadow fleet has already shifted toward third-country ports, particularly in Southeast Asia, to keep operating far from European scrutiny.

Nothing guarantees that Murmansk and Tuapse won't also find workarounds — other, less-watched Russian ports, other ship-to-ship transfer routes on the high seas, other intermediaries willing to take the risk for a hefty premium. The economic war against Russia's shadow fleet resembles, in many respects, a cat-and-mouse game that will probably never end in a total, definitive victory.

What a partial success still means

But a partial success is not a failure. Every act of evasion made costlier, every additional ship-to-ship transfer route required, every insurer that now refuses to cover a suspect vessel, represents added friction in a machine that needs to stay fluid to finance a war efficiently. Western sanctions never had the realistic ambition of fully stopping Russian oil exports — they aim to cut into the profitability, speed, and predictability of that trade.

From that vantage point, listing Murmansk and Tuapse adds to a growing pile of friction that, combined with Ukrainian military pressure on refineries and the resulting fuel shortages inside Russia itself, paints a picture where the Kremlin's war economy becomes a little harder to manage every month.

I will not pretend that closing two ports will topple Putin's regime. That would be dishonest, and it is exactly the kind of exaggeration I refuse to indulge in. But I equally refuse to dismiss this measure as insignificant simply because it doesn't make the evening news. Economic war is won by attrition, not by a single knockout blow.

Kyiv welcomes a long-awaited move

In Kyiv, the official reaction was swift. The Ukrainian government has demanded for months that maritime sanctions against the shadow fleet be tightened, viewing it as one of the last remaining levers to weaken the Kremlin's oil revenue. Listing Murmansk and Tuapse on the European blacklist, along with the activation of the anti-circumvention tool, were presented by several Ukrainian officials as confirmation that Western pressure is intensifying alongside Kyiv's own strikes on Russian oil infrastructure.

This convergence is no diplomatic accident. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has consistently pushed for its Western partners to treat Russian oil as a legitimate strategic target, on par with tanks or missiles. The fact that the European Union now names specific ports rather than abstract categories of vessels marks, for Ukrainian officials, a further step toward a sharper sanctions doctrine.

Internal tensions within the European Union persist

It would nonetheless be misleading to present this 20th package as the product of a frictionless European consensus. Several member states, historically more dependent on Russian energy imports or more cautious about the economic fallout of sanctions, voiced reservations during negotiations, according to information reported by Reuters. These internal tensions are a reminder that every new European sanctions package remains the product of a difficult political compromise among 27 governments with sometimes divergent energy and economic priorities.

Despite this friction, the package ultimately included some of the most ambitious measures since the start of the conflict, which suggests that war fatigue in certain governments has not yet reached a point of institutional gridlock. That may be the best hidden news in this technical press release: European unity, however imperfect, still holds.

What strikes me most about this diplomatic sequence is the persistence of a Western reflex one might have thought exhausted after more than four years of war: the drive to keep searching, package after package, for new levers of pressure. This is not enthusiasm. It is bureaucratic endurance, and in this war, endurance matters as much as boldness.

Twenty packages, a question of credibility

The fact that the European Union has now reached its 20th sanctions package since February 2022 says as much about the resilience of the Russian economy as it does about Western determination to keep the pressure on. Every new package has to navigate the diverging economic interests of 27 member states, some historically more dependent on Russian gas and oil than others, some more commercially exposed to the fallout of harsher sanctions.

That this 20th package managed to introduce, for the first time, the anti-circumvention tool and to name specific ports by name reflects a meaningful evolution in the European consensus. This is no longer just a matter of rhetorical solidarity with Ukraine — it has become an increasingly sophisticated legal architecture, drafted by lawyers who have had four years to study every flaw in the previous system.

What this means for the rest of the conflict

The question that remains, as this full-scale invasion approaches its fifth year, is one of staying the course over time. Sanctions only work if they are maintained, strengthened, and rigorously enforced — not merely announced in a press release and then forgotten. The history of Western sanctions against Russia since 2022 shows a broadly upward trajectory in sophistication, but also moments of slippage, notably when certain Western governments granted temporary exemptions for the purchase of Russian oil.

For Ukraine, every port closed off to the Russian shadow fleet is a modest but real diplomatic victory, adding to its own military successes against oil infrastructure. For the West, it is an ongoing test of its ability to hold a hard line over time, without buckling to internal economic pressure or the diplomatic fatigue that stalks every prolonged conflict.

What worries me is not the technical sophistication of these sanctions — it is real, and it keeps improving. What worries me is the West's ability to hold this line for another year, two years, maybe more, without political fatigue eventually reopening doors that took four years to close.

What Murmansk and Tuapse really tell us

Murmansk and Tuapse will probably never be the subject of a major television report. These are not names that resonate like Bucha, Mariupol, or Kharkiv. And yet, their inclusion in this 20th European sanctions package tells an essential part of this war: the part fought far from the front lines, in the icy waters of the Arctic and the mild waters of the Black Sea, between European Commission lawyers and shell-company shipowners.

This administrative battle, unspectacular as it may be, is part of a broader convergence with direct Ukrainian military pressure on oil infrastructure and the Russian shadow fleet. Together, these two fronts — international law and Ukrainian drones — are drawing an increasingly difficult reality for the Kremlin's war economy.

A war also won far from the trenches

Ukraine is fighting on the ground, with its soldiers, its drones, its documented courage since February 2022. But it also benefits, with a consistency worth acknowledging, from the legal and economic backing of a European Union that has finally come to understand that modern war is also won in shipping registries and sanctions lists. Murmansk and Tuapse are two more names on a list that, over time, makes the economic survival of Vladimir Putin's regime a little more complicated every day.

I close this piece with one modest certainty: I don't know when this war will end, nor whether one more closed port will tip anything on its own. But I know that every gesture of this kind, repeated twenty times over four years, builds a cumulative pressure Moscow can no longer ignore. It is not much. In a war of attrition, it is also exactly what is needed.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

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