Intelligence Briefs
Long-form, data-driven open-source intelligence reports on Russia, Iran and the wider CIS region — built from primary registries, vessel-tracking signals, satellite imagery, sanctions designations and corporate records.
Our intelligence briefs are the deep-research counterpart to our anonymised case studies and analyst blog. Where a case study shows how a single investigation was run, a brief maps an entire system: a logistics corridor, a shadow fleet, a sanctions-evasion network. Each brief is assembled the way a professional intelligence shop assembles a target package — findings first, scored by confidence, with an auditable source register and a watchlist of entities, vessels and infrastructure nodes for continuous monitoring.
Every brief on this page is open-source: it relies only on publicly available data — corporate registries such as EGRUL and SPARK-Interfax, OFAC and EU sanctions lists, AIS vessel-tracking gaps, port-berth satellite snapshots, railway station codes, customs records and reputable investigative reporting. We do not publish anything that could not be independently reconstructed by another analyst from the same public sources. That discipline is what makes the research citable, defensible and useful to compliance, legal, journalism and policy teams.
Published briefs
Russia's Shadow Fleet: Oil Sanctions Evasion
How an estimated 600 tankers systematically circumvent Western oil sanctions through dark maritime logistics, AIS manipulation, ship-to-ship transfers and layered corporate ownership across multiple flag states.
The Dark Fleet in 2026: Shadow Tankers & AIS Evasion
A 2026 state-of-the-fleet assessment: verified size estimates, flag-state churn, vessel age profile, the marine-insurance gap, the primary Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan oil trades, and the escalating EU, US and UK regulatory response.
Sanctions Evasion Vessel Tracking: OSINT Field Guide
A practitioner field guide to detecting and tracking sanctions-evading tankers: AIS gap and spoofing forensics, satellite SAR and optical cross-checks, ship-to-ship transfer detection, flag hopping, IMO identity fraud and the public tools that make it observable.
Oil Price Cap Evasion: How Russia Beats the $60 Cap
A forensic look at how the G7/EU price cap on Russian crude is evaded: attestation fraud, the shadow-fleet workaround, the compliant-on-paper trick, and the 2024-2026 tightening — with KSE and CREA revenue estimates.
Venezuela Oil Sanctions Evasion: Shadow Tankers
How PDVSA crude still reaches Chinese refiners despite a six-year US blockade — and why the tankers carrying it are the same dark-fleet hulls that move Russian and Iranian oil. STS transfers, Malaysia relabelling, the shared fleet.
Iran–Russia Oil & Caspian Trade Flows
A trade-flow brief on the Iran–Russia energy and goods relationship: gas-for-oil swaps, INSTC Caspian cargo, sanctioned operators on both sides, payment workarounds, and how analysts track the trade in open sources.
Sovcomflot Under Sanctions: Russia's State Tanker Fleet
An entity and corporate-structure brief on PAO Sovcomflot (SCF Group): state ownership, the layered OFAC, EU and UK designations, post-2022 vessel reflagging, and the OpenSanctions, OpenCorporates and EQUASIS workflow used to map the group.
INSTC Caspian Corridor: Russia–Iran Logistics
How the International North–South Transport Corridor moves goods — and covert military cargo — across the Caspian Sea between Russian and Iranian ports, with port-by-port infrastructure analysis, sanctioned operators and an interactive route map.
AIS Spoofing Detection: A Field Guide
How to tell a manipulated AIS track from a real one — the spoofing and GPS-jamming signatures that betray a sanctioned vessel, with the open-source counter-indicators analysts use.
Flag-Hopping & Fraudulent Ship Registries
How sanctioned vessels launder their identity by cycling through open and fraudulent flag-state registries, the de-flagging timeline, and how to detect a flag-of-convenience pattern.
Fake P&I Cover: Shadow-Fleet Insurance Fraud
How sanctioned tankers sail on forged or phantom protection-and-indemnity certificates — the fictitious insurers, the coverage gap, and the questions that expose a fake policy.
The Garantex Crypto Laundering Network
How a sanctioned Russian crypto exchange allegedly reconstituted itself through a successor platform and a ruble-backed stablecoin, and how to trace the wallet network in open sources.
How to Trace a Russian Company's Beneficial Owner
A reproducible OSINT workflow to unmask the ultimate beneficial owner behind a Russian legal entity using EGRUL, SPARK and corporate records — the nominee layers and how to collapse them.
OpenSanctions Investigation Workflow
A practical, reproducible workflow for screening entities and persons against consolidated sanctions and PEP lists with OpenSanctions — search, match, graph and attribute.
How our briefs are built
Each report follows a consistent intelligence-grade structure so findings can be trusted and re-checked. An executive summary leads with the key intelligence findings, each tagged with an impact rating and a confidence score (A/B/C) and tied back to the collection vectors that produced it — OSINT, GEOINT, SIGINT or IMINT. Infrastructure and bottleneck analysis maps the physical nodes: ports, berths, railway stations and their interconnections. Cargo profiling separates licit, public trade from covert or illicit flows. Corporate and fleet actor sections name the operators, shipping lines and rail entities involved and record their current sanctions status across the US, EU, UK and UN regimes.
We close every brief with the parts that make research operational rather than merely descriptive: an intelligence-gaps section that states plainly what we could not confirm and what collection would close those gaps; early-warning indicators with 14, 30 and 90-day escalation triggers; a source register that functions as an audit trail; and an operational watchlist of the priority entities, vessels and nodes worth monitoring going forward. This is the same methodology we apply in client engagements, documented in our OSINT methodology library and available as a paid service through our due-diligence desk.
Use the research
These briefs are free to read and cite. If you are a journalist, compliance officer, sanctions analyst or researcher and need the underlying methodology, our methodology explainers cover the OFAC 50 Percent Rule, general licences, CASP regulation under MiCA, ship-to-ship transfer detection, flags of convenience and AIS gap analysis. To run a similar investigation against a specific counterparty, vessel or corporate structure, request a due-diligence engagement or explore our free OSINT tools for company, sanctions, vessel and infrastructure lookups.