On a warm night in August 2023, Oleksandr Kubrakov, then a senior minister in Ukraine’s wartime government, had just settled into a sleeper car on the eastbound train from Lviv to Kyiv when he got a call from the country’s main intelligence agency, the SBU. Its agents had deployed a set of naval drones in the Black Sea, and they had come upon an interesting target: a massive oil tanker near the Russian port of Novorossiysk. They asked for permission to sink it.
“I told them, ‘Hang on,’” Kubrakov told us. “‘What flag is it flying?’” The drone’s night-vision camera made it difficult to tell, but the flag was clearly not Russian. “That’s not our target,” Kubrakov recalled telling the officer. “That would be piracy. Those are not our methods. We don’t touch civilian vessels, especially those flying some other flag.”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2025/12/russia-ukraine-war-putin-zelensky-oil/685194/