The Daily View: It’s never OK to take out tankers

FRANCIS Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie masterpiece Apocalypse Now sees Harrison Ford’s character Colonel Lucas instruct Martin Sheen’s Colonel Willard to terminate the command of a US army officer who has gone renegade in the bush.

“Terminate the colonel?” asks Willard. “Terminate with extreme prejudice,” butts in a civilian adjutant.

This, one of the famous quotes in film history, has come back into my mind after spending the day pondering whether Ukraine had any legal right to hit a suezmax and an LR2 in Turkish waters last Friday.

In normal circumstances, any naval attack on any merchant vessel of any flag potentially constitutes a war crime and shipowners have the right to seek recourse in any court that recognises universal human rights.

Yet Timon Karamanos and Dimitris Anassis, partners in the Piraeus office of law firm Hill Dickinson, tell me that Ukraine may have an arguable case for doing what it did.

This will hinge on whether the action can be described as in furtherance of a war aim.

Multiple editorials in Lloyd’s List since February 2022 — many of them penned by me — have taken a stance supporting Ukraine in its efforts to fight Russia’s illegal invasion.

The Kremlin’s onslaught has been brutal. Incidents such as the airstrike on a drama academy in Mariupol, which may have killed hundreds, and the massacre in Bucha, where the body count was confirmed at that level, are completely unconscionable.

The issue of what we should say about European and other sanctions on Russia, which after directly hitting our shipowner and marine insurance readers in the pocket, was one of the most intense debates we have had in the office in recent years.

Our conclusion was that Ukraine’s struggle does justify some burdens on our industry, which probably isn’t the most popular thing for a shipping publication to say.

But there are moral limits on what it may do to defend itself. While I suspect some colleagues will disagree with what I am about to say, I think that deliberately blowing up tankers oversteps those limits.

True, both Kairos (IMO: 9236004) and Virat (IMO: 9832559) were sanctioned vessels and those that decide these things will have had reasons for reaching that determination.

But they remain private property and should thus not be subjected to arbitrary obliteration.

They are also civilian-crewed. While no seafarers are reported to have died or been injured by Kyiv’s naval drones, that is probably down to luck.

Our support for the embattled nation remains undiminished. If Trump succeeds in forcing Ukraine to hand over a sizeable slice of its territory to an unprovoked aggressor, he will be trampling on the right of nations to self-determination first set out by his predecessor Woodrow Wilson in his ‘14 Points’ speech over a century ago.

Lloyd’s List sees itself as a mouthpiece for shipping, so arguing that ships should be spared the fallout of a dreadful conflict that has killed many Ukrainians — and even more Russians — will be seen as special pleading. And of course, it is.

But if it’s not OK for the Houthis to terminate tankers with extreme prejudice, it’s not OK for Zelensky either.

David Osler
Law and marine insurance editor, Lloyd’s List

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