New Delhi, June 10 -- The tanker Oneiroi was boarded by an EU inspection team in the Mediterranean on June 1, its false-flag declaration challenged, its cargo of crude loaded at the Russian port of Primorsk six weeks earlier placed under scrutiny. Then it continued sailing. By June 5 it was at Port Said. By mid-June it is expected to offload in Gujarat, India. The boarding, the first physical inspection Operation IRINI has conducted against a shadow fleet vessel in international waters, produced no interdiction, no cargo seizure, no rerouting.

there is no such category in any instrument of international maritime law - and was using a politically invented term to justify what amounted to the intimidation of civilian shipping. Russia, she ...