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Russian President Vladimir Putin has condemned France’s recent seizure of a sanctioned oil tanker in the Atlantic as an act of piracy.

Getting into it: The vessel, the Tagor, was boarded Sunday by the French navy with UK support in international waters more than 400 nautical miles west of Brittany, in an operation Macron unveiled Monday with video of commandos rappelling from a helicopter onto the ship. French authorities say the tanker had sailed from the Russian port of Murmansk while falsely flying a Cameroonian flag and heading toward Cameroon, and that it was already under European Union, UK, and US sanctions. Officials described it as a known and tracked vessel that was “almost empty” and had repeatedly swapped flags, and said they diverted it to verify the legitimacy of its flag. The ship was carrying 23 crew members, and its captain is believed to be Russian.

Macron defended the seizure as both lawful and necessary, saying it was unacceptable “for ships to circumvent international sanctions, violate the law of the sea, and finance the war that Russia has been waging against Ukraine for more than four years,” and insisting the operation was carried out “in strict compliance with the law of the sea.”

Russia rejected that framing outright. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the action “illegal” and “bordering on international piracy,” echoing Putin’s longstanding characterization of such detentions, while Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova mounted a detailed legal challenge. She argued that international law gives no warship the right to force a ship off course and haul it into a national port, and disputed that the measures even qualified as sanctions, claiming only UN Security Council-approved restrictions count as “international.” Zakharova warned that taking that kind of enforcement into open waters, where freedom of navigation is supposed to rule, could ripple out across global shipping, noting that many ships serving European interests also sail under “flags of convenience.”

The seizure is the latest in a Western campaign against Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, the hundreds of aging tankers Moscow uses to keep its oil flowing and bankroll the war despite sanctions, with nearly 600 such vessels now targeted by the EU. France has boarded several shadow-fleet ships since September and in April rolled out a plan to slap more penalties on ships caught flying false flags or blowing off inspections. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has also authorized the British military to board them.

Despite all that, the tracking data tells a different story, with scores of sanctioned Russia-linked ships still slipping through Western waters on the regular.