The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The End of the Shadow Fleet? – French Edition

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

France has seized a shadow fleet tanker suspected of carrying sanctioned oil under a false flag and has taken it to Marseille. Should this ship be formally impounded, the entirety of the shadow fleet would fall.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4q1N5fQ

Everybody, Peter Zine, here coming from Colorado. Today we're looking at the Russian Shadow Fleet, specifically non-U.S. countries going after the fleet. What was really interesting from my point of view is on the 22nd of January, so last Thursday, the French grabbed a ship called the Grinch for suspicion of flying an inaccurate flag and carrying sanctioned oil, which would define every ship that the Russians, the Iranians, and until recently the Venezuelans have been using to transport

their oil. The reason why this really matters is with the exception of the Venezuelan enforcement actions that the U.S. is engaged in right now, no country has pulled over any shadow fleet vessel for those reasons. Maybe they think that there's a drone launch system on board and they see it as a security issue. Maybe the ship is having engine trouble. They need to tow it to port. Those things have happened. But never one has ever tried to use military force to enforce the sanctions on Russia or to try to break the shadow fleet. This would be the very first instance of that. And the French have grabbed the ship

and towed it to Marseille for investigation. And obviously it's false flagged. And obviously it doesn't have an insurance policy. And obviously it's part of the shadow fleet. So we are watching this very closely because if this actually results in the ship being impounded and its cargo seized and distributed, however the French decide to handle it,

we will then see every NATO country and probably quite a few non-NATO countries basically going through and gobbling up the entire shadow fleet in a matter of weeks because it is very easy to do so. Now, the French are a competent naval power. They grab the ship in the Mediterranean, but, you know, most of them is not going to be that complicated because you've got places like the English Channel or the Skagorad or the Turkish Straits where the ships have to pass through a narrow choke point in an area where

local neighbor powers are more than capable of grabbing civilian traffic that isn't supposed to be there. The second piece is that a company called GMS, a global maritime services, has applied for permission to OFAC, that's the Office of Foreign Assets, works with Treasury in the U.S. departments to basically manage foreign assets, has basically said, hey, we are here, we are ready to take possession of these shadow fleets.

We'll bid on and we'll pay for them, and then we'll break them down and remove them from service completely. None of these ships are new. Most of them are just floating buckets, their accidents waiting to happen, and if it hadn't been for the existence of the Russians needing to create the shadow fleet,

and the Iranians needed to create the shadow fleet, All of these ships would have been decommissioned years ago. So let us do our job and help you do your job, and we can easily take more than 100 of these things in the next six months. There's probably about a thousand shadow vessels out there. Anyway, GMS is the largest company that has expressed an interest in playing a role in this. They've applied directly to the U.S. government. And so we're seeing the institutions now starting to move to grab the shadow fleet,

remove it from contention, and then permanently dismantle it so that it can never be rebuilt. If this goes the direction it seems to be going, this next six months is going to be wild in energy markets because these tankers are collectively carrying something like 5 million barrels of crude a day. Removing all of that in a short period of time is going to cause a lot of pain in a lot of places, but nowhere more than the countries that will no longer be able to sell their crude, most notably Iran and the Russian Federation. So years off to a roll and start, and here we go.