In Homer’s Odyssey, the sea is not a place. It is, instead, a political condition. Gods quarrel, scheme, and settle scores across its surface while men sail through consequences they had no hand in making. Odysseus makes it home, barely, because a goddess takes his side. His crew does not make it home at all. They are the ones who actually work the ship, unnamed in most readings of the epic, their deaths folded into the footnotes of someone else’s story.
On 6 July 2025, Houthi militants surrounded the Magic Seas in the Red Sea. They set it on fire, filmed the burning, came back the following day, and sank the Eternity C the same way. By the time the search for missing sailors was called off on 14 July, seven Filipino crew members, one Russian crew member, and an Indian security guard were gone. Six Filipinos were still being held hostage. These were not soldiers. They were merchant mariners moving cargo through a corridor that carries roughly 12 per cent of global trade. No provision of international maritime law saved them. No sanctions regime, including the ones that helped destabilise those waters in the first place, had been designed with them in mind.
The gods are still negotiating and the crew is still paying.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF MARITIME LAW AND ITS LIMITS
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has been called the constitution of the oceans. It was adopted in 1982 after nine years of negotiation and runs to 320 articles. It guarantees freedom of navigation, carves out exclusive economic zones, and attempts to bring legal order to a space that had resisted it for centuries. What it cannot do is compel anyone to act when a flag state neglects its crew, when an armed group targets a cargo ship, or when geopolitical calculations override the safety of the people on board. UNCLOS distributes jurisdiction. It does not enforce it.
The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) fills some of that gap, setting safety standards and seafarer welfare requirements through instruments like the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC). But the IMO’s secretary-general, Arsenio Dominguez, has been quite direct about where its authority ends. “It is not an intention of the IMO to engage or try to trespass into the judicial process of the countries,” he said. “But I do ask for every single country to treat seafarers rightly, to provide them with due process.” Asking. Not requiring. The distinction matters.
Since 2022, Western governments have tried to use maritime trade itself as a sanctions instrument against Russia. Primary sanctions cut off Russian entities from global financial systems. Secondary sanctions threaten foreign firms that do business with those entities. A G7 price cap set a ceiling of 60 dollars per barrel on Russian crude. Taken together, these measures were designed to drain Russian war revenues. Whether they actually do that is debated. What they have unambiguously done is reshape the physical geography of global oil shipment in ways their architects did not fully anticipate, and did not design anyone to manage.
THE DARK FLEET AND THE PEOPLE INSIDE IT
Sanctions did not stop Russian oil from moving; rather, they redirected it. A large majority of Russian seaborne oil now moves outside the G7 price-cap shipping system, much of it through the shadow fleet: older vessels, poorly maintained, operating without the insurance frameworks that legitimate shipping relies on. These ships have become the plumbing of sanctioned trade. Somewhere inside that plumbing, there are people who did not necessarily choose to be there.
Shubham Singh was 23 when he got the job offer in late 2020. It looked like a legitimate seafaring career. It turned out to involve shuttling sanctioned Iranian diesel through UAE waters, meeting other boats at night for ship-to-ship transfers, and hoisting an improvised iron shield on the bridge when coast guard speedboats closed in. He did not know any of that when he signed the contract. Recruiters who target young men from economically precarious backgrounds rarely lead with those details.
The dark fleet now accounts for 17 per cent or more of the global oil tanker fleet. Its vessels switch off their Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders to vanish from shipping maps, use forged registration documents, and hide ownership behind chains of shell companies. They sail under flags of convenience from registries with no real capacity or interest in oversight. About a quarter of a million Indians work aboard the world’s merchant vessels, making up nearly 10 per cent of the global seafaring workforce. In 2024, they had the highest rate of ship abandonment of any nationality, according to the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF).
Ship abandonment is worth pausing on because it does not sound as serious as it is. An owner decides the vessel is no longer worth the trouble. Wages stop and phone calls go unanswered. The crew is left aboard because they have no money to leave and nowhere to go. They wait, sometimes for months, eating through whatever provisions remain, in ports that may or may not allow them to disembark. In 2025, the ITF recorded 6,223 seafarers abandoned across 410 ships. India accounted for 1,125 of those individuals. Two thirds of the tanker abandonments involved shadow fleet vessels, ships that represent only 20 per cent of the global tanker fleet.
And if the vessel gets caught, it is usually the crew that answers for it. Seafarers have been arrested and jailed in foreign ports for carrying illegal cargo they had no knowledge of. The IMO has started to address this, issuing guidelines on due process for crew members charged with offences related to illicit cargo they could not have known about or refused. The guidelines are compassionate in tone. They carry no binding force. The person standing watch on the bridge still inherits the legal liability for whatever is in the hold.
THE RED SEA: WHERE SANCTIONS POLITICS MEETS OPEN WARFARE
The West Asian crisis turned the Red Sea into something else entirely. Houthi attacks on commercial shipping began in November 2023, framed as solidarity with Gaza. What followed was not a temporary disruption; it was a sustained campaign against one of the world’s busiest maritime corridors. Around 23,000 ships pass through the Bab al-Mandab Strait each year, connecting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden to the Suez Canal. By early 2024, that number had dropped by more than half.
When the Magic Seas and the Eternity C were attacked in July 2025, there was no warship close enough to intervene. A report by Lloyd’s List Intelligence noted that the only entities able to respond were private maritime security firms, and their capabilities are limited. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) had already passed Resolution 2722 condemning the Houthi attacks and affirming freedom of navigation. The resolution did not save anyone on those ships. Condemnation issued after the fact is not the same thing as protection offered before it.
A bilateral ceasefire between the United States and the Houthis came into effect in May 2025. It held, partially. On 29 September 2025, a Dutch-flagged cargo ship was struck by a Houthi missile in the Gulf of Aden. Two crew members were injured, one of whom later died from his injuries, and he was not in a combat zone in any legal sense. He was in an international shipping lane that three separate bodies of international law theoretically protect.
CONCLUSION
Three thousand years after Homer, the sea is still a political condition. The gods have updated their titles. They go by sanctions regime, security council, price cap, flag state. The technology has changed too: AIS transponders in place of divine winds, G7 communiqués in place of Olympian decrees. But the underlying arrangement has not shifted at all. The people who hold power make decisions at a distance. The people who work the ships absorb the consequences up close.
This is not an argument against sanctions or international law. UNCLOS matters and so does the MLC. The IMO, for all its constraints, is doing more than most. The problem is not the absence of frameworks. It is that none of them treat seafarer welfare as a condition of geopolitical conduct. It remains, at best, a secondary concern: something to address after the strategic objectives have been set.
Odysseus had Athena watching over him. The crew of the Eternity C had a Lloyd’s List report, a UNSC resolution, and private security firms that arrived too late.
The sea has no law that protects the people who sail it, for it has only the law that protects the interests of those who send them out onto it.
The views expressed are personal. She can be reached at anu87913@gmail.com
References:
1. US Maritime Advisory 2026-006, MARAD
3. Houthi Red Sea Attack Kills 3 Seafarers, Insurance Journal, March 2024
4. Dark Fleets Are a Human Rights Catastrophe Waiting to Happen, IHRB, February 2025
5. The Cost of Sanctions: Dark Shipping Fleet Fuels Human Trafficking, Pulitzer Center
6. Two Thirds of Tanker Abandonments Involve Shadow Fleet Vessels, Lloyd's List, January 2026
7. UN Maritime Chief Links Rise of Dark Fleet to Worker Abuses, Pulitzer Center, November 2025
8. Shadow and Dark Fleets: Increasing Size and Concerns, Marine Link, June 2025
9. The Threats Posed by the Global Shadow Fleet, Atlantic Council, April 2025
10. Modi Should Meet Houthi Attacks With Indian Navy Response, Foreign Policy, July 2025
