On June 14, 2026, Royal Marines and National Crime Agency officers boarded a tanker in the English Channel, seized it, arrested a crew member, and impounded a cargo of roughly 100,000 tonnes of crude oil. The UK government is now considering selling that oil at auction and using the proceeds to fund a foreign country’s war effort.
International law has a name for the right to stop a ship at sea and take its cargo. It’s called a belligerent right — because, under the legal architecture built specifically to regulate this, it belongs to belligerents. Parties to a war.
“NATO Allies and NATO are not a party to the conflict in Ukraine. But we are providing unprecedented support to Ukraine.”
Jens Stoltenberg said this himself, at the Bucharest Forum, on November 29, 2022. Both sentences are on NATO’s own website, in the same paragraph, in that order.
Neutral Is Not the Word
It’s worth being precise about what’s actually being claimed, because it isn’t neutrality. The EU and its member states have never pretended to be neutral in this war — they say plainly, and often, that they back Ukraine. What they claim instead is a specific legal status: non-party. Not a belligerent. Not a co-party to the armed conflict. A supporter, but not a participant.
International law does define where that line sits. A state becomes a party to an armed conflict — a belligerent — by declaring war, by participating in hostilities to a significant extent, or by conduct serious enough to cross from support into participation. Scholars actively disagree about exactly where that threshold falls; a 2024 French defense-institute analysis concludes that current Western support to Ukraine does not cross it. That’s a real, respectable legal position, not a cover story. But it means the claim “not a party” is a legal argument being made, not a settled fact being reported — and legal arguments can be tested against the conduct they’re meant to describe.
Here is that conduct, three times over.
The Training
Since October 2022, the EU’s Military Assistance Mission has trained more than 95,000 Ukrainian soldiers, funded by over €600 million from the European Peace Facility — covering basic combat, tactical planning, and advanced weapon-system familiarization on equipment including Patriot air defense systems and Marder infantry vehicles.
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The mission operates exclusively on EU soil, not inside Ukraine. That’s not incidental. A policy analysis of the mission states plainly that structuring it this way let NATO “distance itself” from the war and counter Russia’s narrative about the alliance’s role — a deliberate choice about where training happens, made in order to preserve a legal argument about what the training means.
The Money
On December 12, 2025, EU member states agreed to freeze roughly €210 billion in Russian central bank assets indefinitely. Rather than confiscate the assets outright, the EU is building a “reparations loan”: Ukraine receives large sums now, backed by the frozen assets as collateral, technically repayable only once Russia pays reparations that, on a 45-year loan term, may never arrive.
One law firm’s own published analysis of the mechanism carries this title, verbatim: “Using Frozen Russian Reserves While Sidestepping the Word ‘Confiscation.'” Belgium — which holds the bulk of the assets through Euroclear — has resisted full confiscation specifically because of the legal precedent it would set.
The Tanker
Every prior tanker seizure in Europe before the Smyrtos — Germany in 2024, France and Estonia in 2025, Finland and France earlier in 2026 — ended with the vessel and its cargo both released intact, because no EU or UK legal framework for actually confiscating cargo currently exists. With the Smyrtos, reporting indicates the UK is considering something none of the earlier cases attempted: keeping the oil and selling it. Russia’s government has stated it will examine legal options if that happens.
The doctrine that would justify keeping and selling a seized cargo — the belligerent right described at the top of this piece — exists, under its own governing law, for parties to a war. No party seizing these vessels has declared one.
Three mechanisms. Each one legally structured around a specific, precise claim: this does not make us a party to the war. Each mechanism, examined against the legal criteria for what makes a state a party to a war, uses a tool that exists, under that same law, for parties to a war. The reader is welcome to run the test.
Sources: NATO, Bucharest Forum transcript, 29 November 2022 (nato.int) · European Council, EUMAM Ukraine mission figures (consilium.europa.eu) · EU asset-freeze decision, 12 December 2025, and associated legal analysis (Squire Patton Boggs) · UK tanker seizure reporting, 14–16 June 2026 (Reuters, Al Jazeera) · shadow fleet enforcement analysis (Kharon, Atlantic Council) · co-belligerency and law of neutrality analysis (Chatham House, 2024; IRSEM)
