Russia supplies weapons to Libya using ‘shadow fleet’, Interpol says

Russia is smuggling weapons and military equipment to Libyan militants using its “shadow fleet” vessels.

 Gospodarka Morska reports.

An Interpol investigation, which began last year, has shown that Russia is using old ships not only to smuggle oil, which is subject to sanctions, but also to supply illegal weapons and military equipment to the forces of its ally, Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who controls the eastern part of divided Libya.

Interpol, tracking ships bound for Tobruk in eastern Libya, documented the supply of weapons sent from Russian ports on the Black Sea. According to a report by the international police organization, some of this equipment was received by the Libyan National Army, subordinate to Haftar and his six sons, and some by the Rapid Support Forces, which are fighting government forces in the ongoing civil war in Sudan.

Russia also uses the port of Tobruk to support military juntas in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, which hire Russian mercenaries to fight rebels and jihadists in the Sahel. Ports in Libya also allow Russia to control migrant routes to Europe and establish maritime operations centers near NATO’s southern flank.

Russia’s involvement in Libyan ports has intensified since the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria last December. The new government in Damascus has consistently denied Russian ships access to its former naval base in the Mediterranean port of Tartus and the Khmeimim air base in northern Syria.

One of the vessels Russia used to transport weapons to Libya was the Barbaros, a Cameroon-flagged cargo ship that was spotted in early 2024 passing through the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey. The Barbaros concealed its location by altering its AIS data. This aroused the suspicion of Interpol investigators, who boarded it and discovered dozens of military trucks.

The investigation revealed that the Barbaros had changed its name three times over 12 years and was registered under 10 different flags. And it was not the only vessel used by Russia to transport weapons in the Mediterranean. According to documents from Operation Irini, run by the EU Naval Force in the Mediterranean (EUNAVFOR MED), whose main task since 2020 has been to enforce the UN arms embargo on Libya, Moscow has been using dozens of old merchant ships with unclear ownership to evade detection while transporting weapons to Tobruk and Benghazi.

Russia’s decision to use ships like the Barbaros after its invasion of Ukraine has significantly increased the number of dangerous vessels at sea, from the several hundred previously used by Iran, North Korea and Venezuela to more than a thousand. They were given flags by many African countries, including Liberia (which quickly refused), Comoros, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and even Eswatini, a country that has no access to the sea at all. USM previously reported that a Russian submarine cut off from a port in Syria had found refuge in Algeria.