Shadow Fleet 2.0: Inside Beijing’s Tactics to Evade Western Sanctions on Russian Gas

China is quietly expanding a shadow fleet of tankers to keep importing Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) under U.S. sanctions.

The Gaze reports this, referring to Bloomberg. 

Although the effort is still in its early stages, shipping and ownership patterns of Chinese-linked LNG vessels now mirror the tactics seen in Russia’s “dark fleet” – ships registered through offshore entities that obscure their true operators and cargo origins. The strategy allows energy trade to continue despite Western restrictions.

Satellite and maritime data show that one such tanker, the CCH Gas, carrying a sanctioned Russian LNG shipment, has been turning off its tracking signals as it nears Chinese ports. 

The vessel’s registered owner, CCH-1 Shipping Co., lists a Hong Kong address shared with Samxin Secretarial Services Ltd., a firm known for providing mailbox services to front companies engaged in sanctioned trade with Iran and Russia.

Another LNG carrier with a similarly opaque background, recently renamed Kunpeng, was spotted near Singapore. 

According to the Equasis global shipping database, its ownership and management were recently transferred to obscure companies based in China and the Marshall Islands – both connected to entities that have previously traded other sanctioned fuels.

Building a shadow LNG fleet, however, is far more technically demanding than transporting crude oil. LNG must be kept at temperatures near –162°C, requiring specialized vessels with advanced loading and offloading systems. 

While roughly 8,000 oil tankers operate globally, the entire LNG shipping sector counts only around 800, making concealment and deception much harder.

Russia itself has been assembling its own clandestine LNG fleet since 2024, registering over a dozen tankers to shell companies in an effort to bypass restrictions on its Arctic LNG-2 project.

As The Gaze previously informed, on October 23, the U.S. has imposed a new round of major sanctions targeting Russia’s energy giants Rosneft and Lukoil, in response to Moscow’s continued reluctance to engage seriously in peace efforts to end the Russian-Ukrainian war.

Read more on The Gaze: Currency Operations for Sanctions Evasion: How the Yuan and Dirham Save the Kremlin and Why This Weakness Can Be Blocked