Tanker giants sprout from nowhere to keep Russian oil moving
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At a downtown office block in Mumbai, packing tape peels off a black door whose handle appears to have been ripped out. A pile of post is strewn on the floor outside. A guy from a neighboring office says the staff moved out a few weeks ago, destination unknown.
Almost 1,200 miles away in Dubai, a small office in a run down industrial estate, offers no clues that it, too, is a small cog in Russia’s vast new petroleum supply chain.
The two locations are listed on an international maritime database as belonging to firms running $2 billion in tanker assets between them. They assembled fleets in under a year that are now delivering millions of barrels of Russian oil across the globe.
The first address is for a firm called Gatik Ship Management in Mumbai. The second is for Fractal Shipping. They’re part of a sprawling network of maritime operations that came to prominence soon after the invasion of Ukraine, helping Russia’s oil exports continue substantially unscathed despite sanctions from the west.
