Russia has nearly doubled its sanctioned LNG tanker fleet in under a year to keep gas flowing to China

Russia has nearly doubled its sanctioned LNG tanker fleet in under a year, building the ships needed to keep gas flowing to China. Washington has largely stayed silent — even as Beijing’s appetite for Russian fuel grows. Moscow’s fleet of tankers serving the sanctioned Arctic LNG 2 project grew to at least 20 ships from 11 in under nine months, according to Bloomberg ship-tracking analysis. Most of the vessels carry the opaque ownership structures typical of “dark fleet” ships — the same evasion playbook already familiar from Russian crude.

Why it matters: Arctic LNG 2 has one buyer for its sanctioned cargo — China — and the fleet buildout is the constraint standing between Moscow and a bigger slice of that market. Rystad Energy has raised its 2026 production estimate for the plant by about 9% to 5 mn tonnes on the back of the added ships, though that’s still well short of the facility’s combined 13.2 mtpa capacity across two production trains. A third train is being assembled. For a project the West has tried to shut down at the export stage, added shipping capacity is the difference between a stranded asset and a functioning revenue line for Moscow.

The bottleneck is ice, not buyers: Arctic LNG 2 sits in western Siberia, where the fuel first has to move on specially built icebreaking tankers before transferring to conventional vessels for the long haul to China. Three of the heavy-duty Arc7 ice-class ships are now running; Moscow expects a fourth Arc7 by year-end. Rystad Energy’s Daria Melnik called shipping capacity the “principal constraint,” and Vortexa’s Ashley Sherman said four Arc7 vessels could get both trains to near-full output — but only if transshipment in Russian waters scales alongside. Russia is also running 12 conventional carriers for the winter route, when the Arctic passage freezes over; Rystad estimates the plant needs up to 30 conventional vessels to hit full capacity.

The ships are only half the story: Washington hasn’t sanctioned China’s purchases of the blacklisted fuel or moved against the expanding fleet — a reversal from the previous administration, which had targeted Arctic LNG 2 itself along with its vessels and storage. Xi and Putin met Monday on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kyrgyzstan, where gas ties were reportedly on the Russian side’s agenda.

OUR TAKE- Sanctions were supposed to remove Russian gas from the market altogether; instead, Moscow has absorbed the cost of evasion and kept the cargoes moving. For Gulf LNG strategy, the takeaway is less that Russian volumes are material on their own than that a sanctioned competitor is quietly expanding in the very market Gulf producers are paying hefty premiums to lock down.