South Korea threatens legal action if fuel shipments to Russia found to have broken law

Responding to a Guardian report that revealed thousands of tonnes of fuel was transported to Russia, Seoul said it was investigating the cases

South Korea will take legal action if it finds that shipments of fuel from its ports to Russia broke domestic law, the government has said, responding to a Guardian report on the trade.

Guardian analysis of port records and ship-tracking data found that in July and August over 176,000 tonnes of fuel, mostly diesel, was loaded at several South Korean ports on to seven tankers that made 14 voyages to Russia’s far east.

Three of the tankers were under UK and EU sanctions. One of them took on about 26,000 tonnes through a ship-to-ship transfer at an anchorage off the southern port of Yeosu.

Russia’s capacity to refine oil has been severely disrupted by Ukrainian drone strikes. Its refinery throughput fell in June to its lowest level in more than 20 years, and diesel output is down nearly 30% on last year, according to the International Energy Agency.

“As reported by the Guardian, the loading of refined petroleum products at our ports does not constitute a violation of our domestic law”, it said.

It is unclear who owned or sold the fuel, which South Korean port records do not show publicly.

It said it would examine the tankers’ actual routes, any divergence from their declared destinations and the reasons for them, before judging whether the law had been broken.

The Russian-flagged Aram Khachaturian, which is not under western sanctions, loaded at Ulsan three times in July and August and on each occasion gave a destination other than Russia before sailing there.

On Wednesday South Korea’s presidential office said those remarks were “contrary to fact and inappropriate”, and asked Ukraine to refrain from public comment that could damage South Korea’s international credibility.

Its spokesperson, Heorhii Tykhyi, said Kyiv also had “our own data on such activity”.