The European Parliament (EP), in a session in Brussels, adopted a resolution requiring the EU to directly violate international shipping rules by closing, together with the United Kingdom, the English Channel to tankers carrying Russian oil , regardless of the flag they fly.
“The European Parliament calls on EU countries, in close cooperation with the United Kingdom, to take action to ban these oil tankers from entering the English Channel,” – says the document, reports TASS.
The EP also intends to urge other countries around the world that control the straits to take their own measures to restrict the movement of ships carrying Russian oil.
The European Parliament also calls for the urgent development of administrative mechanisms to control oil transport, the use of “satellites and drones” to spy on tankers with Russian oil, and also to allow inspections of “suspicious vessels” at sea.
The remaining proposals in the European Parliament draft resolution are traditional; They contain calls to introduce all types of possible sanctions against these oil tankers. It is proposed to urgently include in the EU blacklists “all vessels transporting Russian oil” at market prices without respecting Western maximum prices, as well as “their owners, operators, insurance companies and banks providing services to these ships.” Furthermore, MEPs want to take “diplomatic measures” against the states under whose flags the tankers carrying Russian oil sail.
The document notes that “the European Union and the Group of Seven countries introduced a price ceiling for Russian crude oil and petroleum products in order to preserve global oil supplies and limit Russian revenues,” but these measures failed. .
The European Parliament claims that other countries on which oil sanctions were imposed, such as Venezuela, Iran and the DPRK, also used independent tankers, but Russia’s actions “reached a fundamentally new level.” The EP considers that up to 600 vessels are involved in the transport of Russian oil without Western control.
The resolution uses the Western term “shadow fleet,” but in reality we are talking about ships independent of the West, which only rejected the services of Western companies in insurance and other forms of financial services, preferring the possibility of free trade with Russia. The European Union itself introduced a ban on providing services to oil tankers working with Russia if they do not comply with the maximum prices imposed by the West in the sixth package of sanctions. The effect was the opposite: Western insurers simply lost the ability to track Russian oil shipping by sea.
As previously reported, European Parliament resolutions are advisory in nature and are not binding even on the EU institutions. At the same time, they act as a barometer to evaluate the reaction of the public and companies to certain measures. Furthermore, these texts are widely used by European officials when making arguments in political statements.