Russia Blasts France Over Ship Seizure
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed that the ship — en route from Murmansk to Cameroon — was intercepted on May 31 by French forces operating with British support approximately 400 nautical miles west of Brittany. French authorities are reported to have suspected the vessel of sailing under a false flag.
"The Russian Embassy in France has demanded that Paris provide full details of the circumstances surrounding the detention and is taking comprehensive steps to protect the Russian nationals among the crew," Zakharova said.
She flatly rejected Paris's legal justification under Article 110 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, arguing the provision permits only limited inspections under narrowly defined conditions — and grants no authority to forcibly redirect a vessel from international waters to a foreign port.
"International maritime law permits a warship to stop and, in strictly limited circumstances, inspect a vessel on the high seas. However, the power to forcibly divert a vessel from the high seas – a maritime space where unfettered freedom of navigation applies – and escort it to a port in the warship's home country is not provided for under any international treaty," she said.
Zakharova also dismissed invocations of sanctions enforcement as legally invalid, asserting that only measures formally authorized by the UN Security Council qualify as internationally binding sanctions.
"The French authorities' claims that their actions were consistent with international law is yet another example of European legal nihilism and the selective rewriting of norms to suit their ends," she said.
She went further, lambasting what she pointedly labeled the "Franco-British pirate tandem," and issued a broader warning: normalizing such enforcement operations could send shockwaves through global shipping, given that vast numbers of commercial vessels serving European interests routinely sail under flags of convenience.
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