On Houthi missile following vessel attack
U.S. Navy ships fired on a Houthi anti-ship missile in Yemen hours after a tanker operated on behalf of trading giant Trafigura Group carrying a cargo of Russian fuel was hit in the most significant attack yet by the rebel group on an oil-carrying vessel.
The U.S. Central Command said the Houthi missile was prepared to launch and posed an “imminent threat” to shipping in the area. U.S. forces destroyed the missile, Centcom said on X.
The U.S. strike came hours after the Houthi rebels claimed the missile attack on the Marlin Luanda. The vessel was carrying Russianorigin naphtha — a product used to make plastics and gasoline — purchased below the price cap imposed by the Group of Seven nations, a Trafigura spokesperson said Friday.
“All crew on board the Marlin Luanda are safe and the fire in the cargo tank has been fully extinguished,” the company said in a statement on its website at noon in London. “The vessel is now sailing towards a safe harbor.”
The attack on the Marlin Luanda will raise fresh questions about whether oil tankers will continue to transit the Red Sea. Since joint U.S. and U.K. airstrikes on the Houthis earlier this month, tanker traffic in the region has declined but some oil exporters, including Saudi Arabia, continue to use the waterway.
That the targeted ship carried fuel from Russia will likely concern Moscow. Vast amounts of Russian petroleum now pass through the southern Red Sea to reach Asian buyers following Europe’s shunning of its cargoes due to the war in Ukraine. A Houthi spokesman previously told the Russian newspaper Izvestia that Russian and Chinese ships sailing through the Red Sea would be safe even as the group targets U.S. and U.K. vessels.
The vessel collected its Russiaorigin cargo via a so-called ship-toship transfer in the Laconian Gulf in southern Greece, according to data from analytics firm Kpler. The area has been pivotal in helping Russia to get its petroleum to the global market.
Trafigura, along with other commodity traders like Glencore Plc, Vitol Group and Gunvor Group, was one of the biggest lifters of oil from Russia before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and was a partner in a major oil project run by state producer Rosneft PJSC.
That the company picked up a cargo via a ship-to-ship transfer off the coast of Greece sheds light on how one of the world’s biggest commodity trading houses is continuing to facilitate the export of oil products from Russia, at a time when war in Ukraine is still raging.
Ship-to-ship transfers have drawn regulatory scrutiny, mostly related to vessels operating outside of the G-7 price cap where the transfers can make it harder to keep track of a cargo’s origin. There have been particular concerns relating to older ships and when the switching takes place in an unregulated manner.