OFAC, the US Treasury sanctions bureau, let General Licence 134C expire at 12:01 EDT on Wednesday 17 June with no GL 134D issued 1. The licence was the vessel-services umbrella that authorised Western insurance, crewing, bunkering, classification and salvage on Russian-origin seaborne crude. With it gone, that cover is off Russian crude, and Western P&I clubs and classification societies now carry the secondary-liability exposure outside narrow wind-down provisions.
The expiry date was flagged in early June , and the structure had been telegraphed. Marco Rubio signalled the end of the waivers by inaction . The decisive tell came when OFAC renewed GL 55F for Sakhalin-2 LNG and GL 115D for civil nuclear on 11 June, both allied energy-security dependencies, while leaving the crude umbrella to run out . Gas and nuclear cover stay; crude insurance goes. The instrument design reads the policy intent more clearly than any G7 communique.
OFAC renewed two allied-dependency licences on 11 June and let the crude umbrella expire six days later, a sequence too clean to be an oversight. The tradeable expression sits in the compliant-versus-shadow Aframax spread rather than the flat price, which is busy discounting a different barrel. Watch the Baltic and Black Sea compliance bid on TD7 and TD17 re-widen against shadow-fleet rates inside three to five days; if it does, the fraction of Russian crude still routed through European clubs has lost its placement, and the cut is real.
