Boracay, a vessel that claims to have been blacklisted by the European Union for being part of the “shadow fleet” that violated Russia’s sanctions, resumed its journey on Thursday evening and was off the coast of western France on Friday morning, according to the vessel tracking website.
Sources close to the case say the ship’s Chinese captain had previously been tried in a French court because a French court allegedly refused to cooperate, but has returned to a Russian-related tanker, France24 reported.
French President Emmanuel Macron argued that the tankers belong to the so-called shadow fleet of Russia’s so-called aging tankers of uncertainty, which avoided Western sanctions against Moscow’s war in Ukraine, and did not rule out that he could have been involved in drone flights over Denmark because he was sailing off the coast of the Nordic country.
Russian President Vladimir Putin condemned the tanker’s detention as piracy and claimed Macron had begun the move on domestic policy reasons.
“There is no other way to distract the population from French citizens from difficult internal issues that are difficult to resolve,” Putin told Sochi’s forum for foreign policy experts in Russia’s Black Sea resort.
MA/PR