A tanker carrying 60,000 tons of Russian diesel fuel floats idle off the coast of Amsterdam after being turned away from three different ports. Dockers at a port in Sweden and two ports in the Netherlands all refused to offload the fuel, citing “international solidarity” with Ukraine. Business Insider Reports. It looks like there is no port for ships with Russian cargo in the storm – even if that cargo is diesel fuel, quite a hot commodity at the moment.
Sunny Liger is not a Russian ship (she flies the Marshall Islands flag) and is not subject to sanctions prohibiting Russian ships from entering European Union ports. And as Business Insider points out, Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra said the tanker’s cargo was not officially on hold. The tanker was loaded in the city of Primorsk, a western Russian city near the Finnish border, and sailed on April 24. according to sea traffic.
Each time the tanker has attempted to go ashore, Swedish and Dutch dockers’ unions have refused to allow the Sunny Liger to enter their ports. “If dockers anywhere else in the world refuse the cargo, we will refuse that too,” says Niek Stam, head of the maritime department of the Dutch Confederation of Trade Unions. said Bloomberg. “We do this on the basis of international solidarity.”
Large boats were a tempting target for resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Especially Russian yachts will be supervised, confiscatedand in at least one case sabotaged in acts of resistance, partly because Russian oligarchs seem to have it a special fondness for huge luxury boats. But this is the first example we’ve encountered where unionized workers decided to refuse a merchant ship to transport Russian-made cargo. solidarity forever.
