What if NATO blockades Russia's shadow oil fleet?
A NATO interdiction of Russia's shadow fleet pulls ~3mbpd of grey-market crude and detonates the P&I insurance market, so Brent gaps over WTI on the Gulf/seaborne premium and freight/vol spike. Closest analogue is the 2022 invasion shock and the 2019 tanker-seizure episodes, both of which spiked Brent and tanker rates. India and China are the marginal buyers of discounted Russian barrels; cutting the fleet forces them to bid Gulf grades. Forward angle: spare OPEC+ capacity and SPR-coordination capacity cap the rally versus 2022 — sell strength above the war premium.
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The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. NATO launches a coordinated blanket interdiction of Russia's dark-fleet tankers, disrupting sanctioned crude flows and insurance markets. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.