Russia’s Chariot Calls at Iran

It’s time for the next installment in the adventures of the Chariot, a Russian-operated freighter that made headlines in January for delivering tons of Russian munitions to Syria. The Chariot then sailed out of the news for a while. But, with a flair for choosing disturbing destinations, this same ship has just called at Iran.

Though, despite the many layers of sanctions on Iran, that’s not to accuse the Chariot of violating any sanctions. If anything, the voyages of the Chariot go far to illustrate some of the commerce still permitted, despite assorted sanctions on some of the Chariot’s chosen ports of call, including, over the past year, Syria, Iran and the Congo.

It was thanks to a fluke of stormy weather that the Chariot drew attention back in January, when high seas led her to anchor off Cyprus. Cypriot authorities discovered the Chariot was crammed with Russian arms bound for Syria. Mindful that Syria’s Assad regime has been trying to crush a mass revolt by killing thousands of its own people, Cypriot authorities released the Chariot only after obtaining assurances she would bypass Syria.

Instead, the Chariot’s crew turned off their ship’s Automatic Identification System transponder, which transmits a vessel’s location, and the Chariot slipped quietly into the Syrian port of Tartus, which hosts a Russian naval facility. Russian authorities later confirmed that the Chariot had delivered the weapons to Syria, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov telling a press conference in Moscow, “We are not violating any international agreements or U.N. Security Council resolutions.” (That’s correct, because as a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council, Russia, along with China, has blocked U.S. and European efforts to impose U.N. sanctions on Syria.)

Having delivered her cargo of munitions to Syria, the Chariot went on to Turkey. Data from the IHS Fairplay shipping information service show that the Chariot called at Turkey’s Iskenderun Explosives Anchorage, then sailed through the Bosphorus and in late January called at the Ukrainian port of Illichevsk. The Chariot then headed back into the Mediterranean, transited the Suez Canal, rounded the Arabian Peninsula, passed through the Strait of Hormuz, and, arriving about Feb. 29, anchored for 33 hours at the Iranian port of Assaluyeh.

In the eyes of the Russian government, this counts as business as usual. Whether the U.S. and European Union would view it so casually is a different matter. Assaluyeh, located in Iran’s Bushehr Province, is one of seven Iranian ports served by an Iranian port operator, Tidewater Middle East Co., which has been blacklisted by the U.S. and EU as owned or controlled by the proliferation and terror-linked Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. According to the U.S. Treasury, Tidewater “has been used by the IRGC for illicit shipments,” and its Shahid Rajaee container terminal at another Iranian port, Bandar Abbas, “has played a key role in facilitating the Government of Iran’s weapons trade.”

As of this writing, according to IHS Fairplay, the Chariot has left Assaluyeh, but is still in the Gulf, anchored off the United Arab Emirates, with no onward destination yet shown.

What’s going on? Finding the owners of the Chariot is not so easy. The ship is flagged to St. Vincent & The Grenadines. IHS Fairplay shows its registered owner as Westberg Management AG, a company set up in 2006 in the small, mid-Pacific nation of the Marshall Islands — a jurisdiction not known for transparency. The ship’s operators are easier to find, listed as Westberg Ltd., a private company in St. Petersburg, Russia.

So, I recently phoned Westberg Ltd., in Russia, and reached a pleasant employee, who spoke fluent English, and did not want to be named. That employee said the Chariot had been hired, by parties who did not want to be named, on a three-month time charter, starting at the end of November and extending until the end of February. That would imply that the same nameless charterer who dispatched the Chariot to Syria had also dispatched her to Iran.

The same Westberg employee said that the Chariot’s cargo for Iran was all “legal” and consisted of two Ukrainian electrical generators, plus “general cargo.”

I made a separate call to the ship-broking company in Russia that had arranged the charter of the Chariot, Balchart Ltd. There, I reached another pleasant, English-speaking employee, who also did not want to be named. He said “there is nothing fancy” about the Chariot’s voyages. The January arms shipment to Syria, he said, was “not something like Russians helping Syrians to fight the rebels,” but just an “arms contract,” similar to shipments for, say, India, delivered for Rosoboronexport, which is Russia’s state arms dealer. The Chariot, he noted, is “designed to carry dangerous cargo.”

The Balchart employee was eager, however, to add that the Chariot’s cargo for Iran was not weapons, but Ukrainian generators. He explained that the international publicity over the Chariot’s arms delivery to Syria had been unpleasant. Balchart, he said, had received phone calls from “all over the world,” both from angry friends and worried bankers.

What did the Chariot pick up in Iran, and where will she head next? The Chariot, he said, had discharged her cargo in Iran, but picked up nothing; “she is empty,” waiting off the UAE for new instructions. What those might be, he said he did not yet know: “The market is so dramatically poor.”

Though if the past is any guide, the Chariot has a knack for finding interesting employment. Cargoes of tramp ships are not routinely disclosed to the public. But last June, the Chariot called at the Egyptian port of Alexandria, before heading through the Gibraltar Strait and down the west coast of Africa. The Chariot’s cargo manifest for that voyage was obtained by a British analyst, Hugh Griffiths, who heads the Countering Illicit Trafficking-Mechanism Assessment Projects at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and who has shared the document.

According to the manifest, what the Chariot picked up in Egypt was a cargo of arms, shipped by the government of Egypt to the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. More specifically, it was a shipment from the defense ministry of Egypt’s military caretaker government to the defense ministry of the war-wracked Congo. The manifest listed thousands of grenades, 7,000 mortar bombs, more than four million rounds of ammunition, and 700 rockets. None of this appears to have violated any sanctions. It was, as Westberg’s nameless employee in Russia told me, “legal cargo.” The Congo, where millions have died during years of war, has been under a U.N. arms embargo since 2003. But that arms embargo does not apply to the government, although the U.N. Security Council has encouraged the government of the Congo “to address the threat of criminal networks within the Armed Forces.”

Griffiths speaks more bluntly about the problems within the Congo’s government forces, calling such shipments as the Chariot’s munitions consignment for the Congo “destabilizing,” because “U.N. and other reports acknowledge that the main source of arms and ammunition for rebel militias in DRC are Congolese army supplies and that much of the murder, rape and forced displacement in DRC is carried out by renegade Congolese army units.”

Having delivered the Egyptian arms shipment to the Congo last August, the Chariot continued on to Cote d’Ivoire, and via such ports as Spain’s Algeciras and Britain’s Liverpool, made her way to Russia’s St. Petersburg, and thence, with her arms shipment, last January, to Syria. Now, fresh from Iran, she waits in the Gulf. What next?