Some of the petroleum products purchased by the US Department of Defense through suppliers in Greece and Turkey may have been of Russian origin, despite Western sanctions, according to an investigation by The Washington Post (WP) published on Tuesday.

Prohibited Russian oil products take a detour to the US military supplier. Before going to Greece, the transport covers hundreds of kilometers to the oil storage in Turkey. After several changes of ownership, the fuel is then sold to a Greek refinery that serves the US military, the US daily reported.

Russian fuel is transported from Russian ports on the Black Sea – Novorossiysk, Kavkazu, Taman, Tuapse – to Turkey through the Bosphorus. The fuel is no longer labeled as Russian when it arrives in Greece. There, the fuel is refined and mixed with supplies partially purchased by the U.S. military.

After Western countries announced a ban on Russian oil last year in response to the invasion of Ukraine, a Greek refinery that serves the U.S. military has been quick to adapt. Within months, the company told investors it had stopped accepting the banned oil and had found other sources instead.

But there was a reason why Russian oil, at least on paper, could be so easily removed from the supply chain, says WP. Oil products from Russia actually continued to flow to the Motor Oil Hellas refinery in the Aegean Sea, Greece, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, which analyzed shipping and trade data.

Thus, Russian oil took a new route, hundreds of kilometers away, through an oil storage facility in Turkey, a route that allowed Russia to hide its tracks, as ownership of the products passed from one owner to another several times before arriving in Greece.

According to WP estimates, 5.4 million barrels of fuel oil were shipped by sea to the base in Gyortol, Turkey, in the past two years, all but 1.9 million of which came from Russia. Since the entry into force of EU sanctions in February, 2.7 million barrels of Russian oil have been delivered to Dörtyol. During the same period, 4.2 million barrels of fuel oil were transported from the terminal to Motor Oil Hellas. These deliveries account for at least 56% of all fuel received by the Greek refinery by sea.

The Washington Post could not specify the exact proportion of the amount of fuel oil of Russian origin in the products purchased by the Pentagon. Several ingredients are used to improve these products that cannot be traced during production, the publication reveals.

It is known, however, that since March 2022, when the US imposed sanctions on the ban on Russian oil, the Pentagon concluded new contracts with Motor Oil Hellas for almost a billion dollars.

At the same time, about 69 percent of the parcels sent to Dortoyl were of Russian origin, the Post reported, citing data from the Project on Government Oversight.

“While some supplies to Motor Oil Hellas may be in line with the changing landscape of sanctions and embargoes, this dynamic puts the Pentagon in an awkward position: on the one hand, the US government is sending billions of dollars worth of weapons to Ukraine to defend against an invasion by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and on the other hand, you can buy products containing Russian fossil fuels, the main economic engine of the Russian military machine,” the monitoring group said in a statement.

Experts say Russia may have thwarted Western efforts to limit war revenues by restricting its energy trade. Last year, Moscow reportedly formed a secret fleet of “ghost tankers” to hide the origin of its oil. Meanwhile, some experts say Russian oil is likely to be selling well above the Western-imposed maximum price of $60 a barrel, partly because of this phantom fleet, but also because of inflated shipping costs that can hide the true amount paid by customers. , writes the Financial Times.

The Pentagon told WP that it was not aware of the Russian origin of the oil products because the responsibility for compliance with the sanctions lies with the contractors, especially Motor Oil Hellas. The agency itself has no tools to control suppliers, the Pentagon said.

For its part, the Motor Oil Hellas refinery said that the company “does not buy, process or trade Russian oil or products” and that “all its imports are certified as non-sanctioned origin”.

The US Treasury Department, however, sent requests to 30 owners of about a hundred vessels suspected of transporting Russian oil in violation of the price ceiling agreed by Western states, WP reminds.