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The oil tanker, named Grinch, under the watch of the French navy near Marseille
France says it has released an oil tanker suspected of being part of Russia's sanctions-busting "shadow fleet!" after its owner paid a fine.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said the vessel, named Grinch, was "leaving French waters" on Tuesday having paid a penalty of "several million euros".
The tanker was seized by French forces in the Mediterranean in January and then diverted to the port city of Marseille. It had set sail from Murmansk in northern Russia and was flying under a Comoros flag, officials said.
Moscow's so-called shadow fleet is a clandestine network of tankers used to evade Western sanctions on Russian oil exports by using aged tankers with obscure ownership or insurance.
Many Western countries imposed sanctions on Russian oil after it launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
"Circumventing European sanctions comes at a price. Russia will no longer be able to finance its war with impunity through a ghost fleet off our coasts," Barrot said in a post on X.
He added: "The tanker Grinch will leave French waters after shelling out several million euros and three weeks of costly immobilisation at Fos-sur-Mer. Let's keep it up."
"As part of a guilty plea procedure the company that owns the vessel was sentenced by the Marseille judicial court to a financial penalty of confiscation," the public prosecutor's office and regional maritime authorities said in a statement.
The exact amount the vessel's owner was fined was unclear.
While estimates vary, data from the monitoring group TankerTrackers.com suggests the fleet currently consists of 1,468 vessels, roughly triple its size at the time of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago.
The vessels tend to be old and are often poorly maintained. Details of ownership and management are deliberately opaque - names, identification numbers and flags are frequently changed.
Efforts have been stepped up to tackle shadow fleets in recent months and a number of sanctioned tankers have been seized.
Moscow denounced the move, saying no state had the right to use force against vessels properly registered in other states' jurisdictions.
