The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - India Takes on the Shadow Fleet || Bonus Episode

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

India's navy has begun seizing shadow fleet tankers in its exclusive economic zone. If India continues down this path, other countries will likely join the bandwagon, marking the end of the shadow fleet.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihan

Everybody, Peter Zeyn here, come to you from Colorado. I have kind of a weird one for you today. There was a report in the Wall Street Journal today, confirming information that was originally released on the Indian Navy's Twitter account that was then subsequently deleted, that the Indian Navy has been carrying out raids and capturing shadow vessels in India's exclusive economic zone, starting almost two weeks ago on February 5th, today's. is the 17th. Backstory. The Shadow Fleet is a group of roughly 1,000 oil tankers that carries crude for sanctioned countries, most notably Venezuela, Iran, and Russia. And apparently the ships, three ships that the Indians have so far grabbed come from some combination of those three with the Russians absolutely involved. The United States, after it captured the now former president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, has gone after the parts of the shadow fleet

that were actively carrying Venezuelan crude at the time, chasing them up on their way to Europe, chasing them into the Indian Ocean. I believe about eight have been captured so far. Eight out of a thousand is not a lot, but when the world's naval superpower decides it wants to do something on the high seas, it's really not hard for the United States to do it, and now it appears that the Indians are getting in on the act as well. This is really interesting from my point of view for three reasons. Number one, once another country joins the United States in targeting the shadow fleet, it's probably only a matter of days to weeks before many, many other countries do it. There are a lot of countries that don't like Venezuela or Iran or Russia, especially the Europeans.

And now that India of all countries is joining in, we should expect a couple of dozen other countries to do so as well, which would completely remove the shadow fleet from functioning in less than a few months. Considering that there's something like four to five million barrels a day transported in this matter, that can have. have a really big impact economically or politically based on who decides to take advantage of the situation. So that's one. Number two, the fact that the Indians are involved. India has been the second largest beneficiary of the shadow fleet since it really started getting going in the early days of the Ukraine war back in 2022. Basically what happens is someone affiliated with Russia or around

or Venezuela, goes out and buys a decommissioned oil tanker that probably doesn't match current safety norms, gives it a fake insurance policy, puts a fake flag on it, and sends it to pick up the crude from one of those three countries. That crude then comes somewhere on the high seas where it comes up against another shadow vessel and they pump the crude from one to the other in a C to C transfer. Relatively dangerous, but these guys are busting sanctions anymore, so that's not their primary concern. That then happens, once twice, three times more, maybe they mix two crudes into another hold or something. Anyway, eventually another shadow vessel disgorges that cargo in a purchasing country, typically India and China.

And the Indians and the Chinese say, oh, we have no idea where it came from. You know, it's just a convenient fiction and it's just a question of who decides to enforce maritime law. Well, like I said, India is one of the big beneficiaries here, and historically has been the second largest beneficiary of this prize. process. And so for them to go out and grab ships in their own economic zone who have been doing these C to C to see-to-C transfers for four years now to break that policy changes the economics of the shadow fleet and the politics of India very, very deeply. A couple of things here. Number one, India has always, always, always been pro-Russian versus pro-American and has sided with the Russians because of the affiliation they had with them back during the Soviet period. Soviet Union went away.

Modern Russia has nothing to do with the Soviet Union, but the Indians kind of are still fighting the Cold War ideologically from a certain point of view. So them flipping matters. Second, because these are Russian vessels that have Russian flags, having the Indians go against a Russian situation so boldly is really, really notable. It's also been 11 days since this happened, and the idea that just happened once for three vessels is kind of curious. I don't understand why the Indian Navy posted this. I do understand why they tore it down. down right away. Because this is the sort of thing that will reverberate through the shuttle fleet very, very dramatically, because if their ships are being confiscated and the captains

are losing their vessels, the entire capital investment is lost. And it won't be long before the other captains basically throw in the towel or enough of them are grabbed that it changes the economics of shipping this stuff. So all of that combined is number two. A lot going on there. Number three, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia. The Russians have been exporting somewhere between three and four million barrels a day this way for four years. And it is their primary source of income now. And if this is about to go away, then we're going to see some very dramatic changes in a number of things in the eastern hemisphere. Number one, the Ukraine war, if the Russians have lost their single largest source of income, that will manifest on the battlefield. The Chinese may be

supplying the Russians with all the gear that they can pay for, but the key thing there is pay for. And if the Russians can't, then a drone war where the Russians can't get enough. drones is one where the Russians start losing territory and we've seen just in the last 96 hours how when the Russians lose communication equipment they start to lose coherence on the front line and can no longer advance this would be far more dramatic. Two if the Americans and the Indians are seen eye to eye on things like the Russians those are two big changes I've got to talk about India but about the United States there are a number of people within the Trump

administration who have been blatantly pro-Russian this entire conflict but now it appears that that might be changing one of the fun things that happened about three weeks ago is we had a summit between US President Donald Trump and the Indian Prime Minister Narenda Modi and Trump said at the end of their meetings like the United States was going to drop its tariffs by more than half to allow Indian products back in the United States and in exchange the Indians were going to stop using Russian crude the Indian said thank you mr. Trump for the tariff withdrawal but not a single

Indian government person statement post has ever said anything about not using Russian crude until now. And apparently now it looks like maybe less than two weeks after that summit, the Indians started going after Russian tankers. So maybe Trump really did get a deal. Just the Indians are doing it a little bit on the down low. But now that they're actually confiscating tankers, it's not very down low anymore. And if you have the Indians stabbing the Russians in the back, and the Americans and the Indians now starting to get along on economic and strategic matters, that changes all the economics and the politics and the strategy of everything in South Asia, because the United States has reasonable relations with Pakistan. It's been India

that's been clinging onto the Soviet era. If that's no longer the case, if Russian influence has really been purged, then we've entered into a fundamentally new era. And if the Indians are stopping crude from Russia getting to India, you can bet you're pretty ass. that they're going to stop it from getting to China because now China is the only country that has been taking that is still taking Russian crude in volume. And now all of a sudden we're talking about the entirety of the three to four million barrels of the shadow fleet being gouged out of the Chinese economy. Now a lot of this is a couple steps removed from what we know right now. I don't want to say that all of this is destined to happen. But you've removed that much

crude from the system all at once and the whole system feels it. You remove it all from one country's system all at once, and that country is fucked. So we're looking at a broad, structured rearrangement of things in Russia, in Ukraine, in India, China, perhaps all at once. The question is whether or not the foreign policy team in Washington can actually hold that together, considering how much they've purged the decision-making apparatus in the State Department and the national security apparatus and in the military. This is a lot to hold in your head all at once. But if we are moving in that direction, we are looking at the single biggest shift in international politics of at least the last four years. And that will keep me very busy four months

to come.