Holy shit.

"On the last day of March, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) published a routine-looking administrative action: a batch of name removals from the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list.

Buried among counter-narcotics delistings were three Russian-flagged vessels — FESCO Moneron, FESCO Magadan, and SV Nikolay.

Three lines of text on a government webpage made these three ships no longer subject to U.S. sanctions.

Every large commercial vessel is required by international law to operate an Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponder which broadcasts the ship’s identity, position, speed, heading, and declared destination. Port authorities, coast guards, insurers, and compliance teams all rely on this data.

“Going dark” means switching the transponder off, or transmitting false data. When a vessel disappears from AIS tracking, it may be in a geographic dead zone beyond terrestrial receiver range, experiencing equipment failure, or deliberately suppressing its signal to conceal where it is and what it is doing.

In the context of Russia’s shadow fleet, deliberate darkness is the rule, not the exception. Extended AIS gaps correlate reliably with ship-to-ship oil transfers at sea, undeclared Russian port calls, and, according to Soldatov and Borogan’s reporting, potentially the positioning of personnel and equipment for hybrid warfare operations.

The tanker Boracay, previously sanctioned by the UK and EU, was tracked near the Danish coast during drone incursions that forced the closure of Copenhagen Airport in September 2025 — one of three shadow fleet vessels Danish authorities placed under investigation as a possible drone launch point.

French commandos boarded the ship in international waters off Ushant Island on September 27, finding approximately $100 million in Russian oil bound for India, two Russian private security agents who, according to French investigators, were controlling the crew and “representing Russian interests and gathering intelligence”, and a false flag of Benin flying where a proper registration should have been.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the vessel was suspected of “serious offences” but declined to address the drone speculation directly.

Putin called the French boarding “piracy.”

Just yesterday, the day before OFAC quietly removed these three Russian vessels in question from the SDN list, a criminal court in Brest, France sentenced the Boracay's captain, Chinese national Chen Zhangjie, to one year in prison and a €150,000 fine — in absentia, because he was already back at sea.

The ship itself has since been renamed Feniks (“The Phoenix”) and was last reported flying the Russian flag in the Strait of Malacca. Its ultimate beneficial owner has not been publicly identified."