AINEWS
Three photographed vessels — CARUZO, RIZVEL, and MECHTA S — show a shadow fleet adapting to Ukrainian drone strikes with cages, nets, and camouflage borrowed from a century old warship trick.
A 28-year-old tanker called CARUZO drifted through Istanbul's Bosphorus on August 13 fitted with anti-drone netting draped over its bridge, welded metal cages slung along the aft hull to shield the engine room, and rows of water tanks hung off the side as crude kinetic dampeners. The vessel is a sanctioned Suezmax-class oil tanker, IMO 9137648, named on European Union, United Kingdom, Canadian, Australian, Swiss, and New Zealand blacklists for hauling Russian crude outside the G7 price-cap regime. The United States Treasury has not added CARUZO to its own list.
TankerTrackers.com, the shipping analytics firm that tracks vessels via satellite and AIS data, estimated CARUZO was carrying roughly one million barrels of Russian crude at the time of transit. The firm's co-founder, Samir Madani, said the crew had effectively boxed themselves in behind the protective installations. "The fear is real," Madani told reporters. The visual record was first documented by shipping analyst Yoruk Isik and published by the Financial Times on August 13, with TechTimes aggregating the same imagery the same day.
Two more vessels made the same physical bet in the same 72-hour window. The RIZVEL, another sanctioned tanker, was photographed by Isik in the Sea of Marmara south of Istanbul wearing similar anti-drone netting. Then, on August 10, Turkish merchant captain Murat Fırtına photographed a third tanker called MECHTA S at Istanbul's Haydarpaşa port. MECHTA S was painted in a disruptive geometric scheme of jagged black, white, and gray shapes, the visual signature of dazzle camouflage, a 1917 technique developed to confuse enemy rangefinders by making it harder to estimate a ship's course and speed. Painted on thousands of Allied merchant hulls during the First World War, the pattern did not hide the ships. It worked because breaking the eye's ability to read a ship's outline threw off U-boat torpedo calculations. Comparison with older photographs confirmed MECHTA S's paint was a recent addition, not a holdover from the vessel's 2003 launch.
Fırtına, who has worked the Bosphorus for two decades, described what he saw. "Seeing a merchant ship in 2026 in the middle of Istanbul, looking as if it came off the pages of wartime history, is quite unusual." Ukrainian intelligence has separately identified MECHTA S as a habitual transponder-switcher that routinely goes dark on AIS, the maritime tracking system Western sanctions monitors rely on. The armor is a response to enforcement pressure, not a neutral design choice.
The three vessels mark a fleet-level pattern rather than a one-off retrofit. Russia's shadow fleet, the loose flotilla of aging, often opaque tankers that moves sanctioned crude outside the G7 embargo, has spent most of the war hiding digitally. AIS manipulation, ship-to-ship transfers in open water, and falsified cargo records have been the standard evasion toolkit. Ukraine's campaign of long-range maritime drone strikes against Russian oil infrastructure in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov has changed the calculation. Spoofing a transponder does nothing against a fiberglass drone attacking the bridge.
The photographs document a fleet-level transition: from digital evasion to physical armor. Welded cages, draped netting, and 1917 paint schemes are a low-budget answer to a precision threat that AIS switching cannot defeat. The next published transit through the Bosphorus will show whether the rest of the fleet adopts the same wraps.