A morning dog walker looking out on the Channel from Dungeness beach on Thursday January 22 would have been able to make out a familiar silhouette: the long hull of an oil tanker.
The vessel passing just a few miles of Britain’s coast was the Hyperion, part of Russia’s notorious “shadow fleet”, hastily retreating across the Atlantic from Venezuela.
Like the Marinera, a tanker seized by US forces in early January, the Hyperion is one of hundreds of sanctioned ships used by Moscow to transfer oil to and from South America.
