2 Million Tons of Diesel Were Delivered to Turkey from Russian Baltic Ports

In the first half of 2023, the seaports of Turkey increased the transshipment of Russian diesel by almost four times – up to 5.84 million tons, versus 1.55 million tons in the same period of 2022.

This is evidenced by data on the maritime traffic into the ports of Turkey.

In six months of 2023, 5.35 million tons of ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) and 493 thousand tons of gas oil were shipped from Russian seaports to Turkey. The Black Sea port of Novorossiysk turned out to be the largest base for Russian diesel loading – 2.22 million tons. In general, in January-June 2023, deliveries from Russian Black Sea ports to Turkey increased by 1.5 million tons, up to 3.72 million tons.

Diesel from Russia pushed out the fuel supplied from Italy to Turkey – it did not arrive at all in 2023 compared to 638 thousand tons for January-June 2022. Supplies from India decreased from 1.21 million tons to 0.47 million tons. Shipments from the ports of Israel also decreased significantly – to 366 thousand tons (-35%), those of Egypt – to 91 thousand tons (-60 %), none was supplied from Bulgaria, compared to 185 thousand tons in the first half of 2022. Thus, the Russian share in the supplies of diesel to Turkey by sea increased to 75.6%, against 33.3% in the first half of 2022.

At the same time, there is new shipment of diesel from the Russian ports in the Baltic Sea and it is growing rapidly. In 2021, no diesel was supplied to Turkey from this direction at all. First tankers made passage after Russia's full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in June 2022, the delivery was made by Lukoil's European trading company - Litasco. The trader loaded 30,000 tons of diesel in the port of St. Petersburg on the ANDROMEDA ship, which was addressed to the port of Mersin in the South of Turkey. After that, the flow and number of sellers of the Russian diesel from the Baltic Sea ports (the ports of Primorsk, St. Petersburg, Vysotsk) started growing, and in the end of the second half of 2022, it increased to 764 thousand tons. Within the first half of 2023, such deliveries increased many times and reached 2 million tons!

A total of 126 vessels were delivering resources during January-June. The largest volumes of Russian diesel were delivered to Turkey by the LADYBUG (Liberia flag) and BEKS BLUE (Marshall Islands) tankers - 5 batches each in the volume of 30-33 thousand tons from the beginning of 2023, and the BEKS LINA (Marshall Islands) vessel - 4 passages bringing 29.9-32.9 thousand tons of cargo. At the same time, the largest one-time deliveries were made by such ships as BEKS WIND (Marshall Islands) - 62.6 thousand tons of Litasco diesel shipped to Novorossiysk, and APANEMO (Malta) - 65 thousand tons of NEST WISE resource from Primorsk. The Turkish METIN KA vesse; with a deadweight of 6.3 thousand tons made the biggest amount of passages in terms of number - 13 deliveries since the beginning of the year from the city of Tuapse, mainly to the port of Samsun.

In terms of the sources of receipt, the most pronounced dynamics of deliveries of the Russian resource was evidenced to the southern ports of Turkey (Mersin, Dertoil, Iskenderun) - 2.6 million tons (a tenfold increase in volumes compared to January-June 2022). At the same time, deliveries to the North-Western hub closest to Ukraine (Deringhe, Marmara, Gebze, and Aliaga), from where fuel is often supplied to Ukrainian importers, increased by 1.03 million tons to 2.61 million tons.

The fact that Russian oil products may travel a long way, bypassing the entire Europe, as in the example of deliveries from the Baltic Sea, once again exacerbates the issue of controlling the origin of imports to Ukraine. There must be an inspection of any source of fuel receipts that was not shipped from the manufacturing facility.

According to the data of export deliveries from the ports of Turkey, 364 thousand tons out of 2.52 million tons of marine diesel exports were contracted by Ukrainian importers or their trading partners. Of these, 265.7 thousand tons are delivered from the terminals in Marmara and only 68.6 thousand tons from the STAR refinery in Aliaz.

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