Beijing/Hong Kong —
Ice was still heavy on the water when the hulking Christophe de Margerie tanker set off on the first journey of the season along the Northern Sea Route in late May.
It had just stopped at a port connected to Arctic LNG-2, a US-sanctioned liquefied natural gas facility deep in the Russian Arctic, shipping data shows. From there, led most of the way by an icebreaker, the tanker lumbered through thousands of miles of Arctic waters and the Bering Sea.
Its roughly two-week trip ended at the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East, where the tanker slipped into a secluded bay that used to be home to a Soviet military settlement.
There, satellite imagery reviewed by CNN shows the Christophe de Margerie sidled up against a sprawling floating storage unit, in a formation typical of ship-to-ship cargo transfers. The tanker appeared to unload its blacklisted cargo into the unit, before beginning its journey back to the Arctic, Marine Traffic data shows.
