Yesterday, a story broke in the alternative media, warning about the possible false flag attack that’s being planned by the British intelligence and would involve Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers. According to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), London’s plan envisages a large-scale diversion with massive damage, both in financial and environmental terms, which would enable the Western powers to declare the transport of Russian oil as a threat to international shipping. The SVR specified that the British are working on two potential scenarios.
The first scenario would be to stage an accident of an "undesirable" tanker in one of the bottlenecks of maritime transport. According to the SVR, a major disaster involving a shipment of Russian crude could be used as a pretext to declare all suspected “shadow fleet” cargoes potentially dangerous and warranting detention in international waters.
A large oil leak and a blockage of an important shipping lane, as London believes, could provide NATO a pretext to create a precedent for the practice of "emergency inspections" of commercial vessels to force compliance with maritime safety and environmental protection standards. This could be a bit like the security procedures from the Global War on Terror, which we are still forced to put up with at airports, only at an industrial scale, empowering NATO with maintaining the security of global maritime traffic.
The second scenario would involve setting fire to a tanker during loading at a port in a state friendly to Russia. The fire should cause extensive damage to the port's infrastructure and spread to other ships, which could then require an international investigation, which would place the responsibility for the disaster either on Russia or on Ukraine, similar to the case of the Nord Stream gas pipelines being blown up. Apparently, London would entrust the execution of these terrorist attacks to the Ukrainian security forces, which would afford the British a guarantee of their own impunity.
The time and place of the attacks would be carefully chosen in order to leverage the media narrative to its full effect, pressuring Washington to adopt the harshest secondary sanctions against buyers of Russian energy resources and casting them as the "indirect culprits of the tragedy."
Is this just Russian propaganda?
In its warning, the SVR has levelled a serious accusation against London. Without a doubt, many will dismiss this as groundless Russian propaganda against the dependable Western ally and a beacon of human rights, freedom and democracy. Only, London has had the Russian “shadow fleet” in its crosshairs for some time now, and we learned about that last summer: on Thursday, 18 July 2024, Volodymyr Zelensky made a trip to London for an official visit.
On the occasion, he participated at the European Political Community Summit held at the Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire along with delegates of 44 other democratical countries. Speaking at the event, Zelensky the UK leadership, which had been “one step ahead in its determination to support Ukraine” since the Russian invasion began.
The summit concluded, apparently with the participants reaching an agreement to target Russia’s “shadow fleet” of tankers: some 600 vessels enabling Russia to evade West’s oil sanctions. The Ukrainians might have already done practice runs in attacking Russia’s oil transport infrastructure: in an incident last August, a ferry carrying 30 fuel tanks was attacked and sunk at the Russian port of Kavkaz in Krasnodar region.
If the attacks on the Russian shadow fleet escalate significantly and if London’s false flag scenario succeeds, the Russians might retaliate, possibly against Western oil interests. If both sides proceed to inflict harm upon one another, the conflict could add up to a serious disruption in the oil markets and push the price of a barrel far above today’s levels, which remains relatively low at about half its 2022 peak levels.
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Today’s trading signals
With yesterday’s closing prices we have the following changes for the Key Markets portfolio:
