69 Seafarers Killed in War Attacks This Year as Wage Stagnation Bites

At least 69 merchant seafarers have been killed in war-related attacks this year — a death toll the industry has not seen since the tanker wars of the 1980s. That figure anchors the launch week of Splash Crew, a new title from Splash dedicated to the people who keep global shipping moving, and it lands alongside another uncomfortable number: tanker masters are earning less in real terms than they were 16 years ago, despite the extraordinary freight boom that has fattened carrier balance sheets.

What else did the Splash Crew investigation find?

The opening week's reporting pulled no punches. China is facing a growing shortage of junior officers, a structural crewing gap that could tighten Manning costs for owners trading in Asia. The family of a Finnish seafarer jailed in Turkey made an urgent appeal for medical intervention. And the secretary-general of InterManager, writing exclusively for Splash Crew, examined how rest hour records can bear little resemblance to life at sea — a compliance-versus-reality gap that will resonate with any operator who has audited work/rest logs.

There was one potential bright spot for overworked crews. Maritime technology executives predicted that AI could consign the traditional noon report, and much of shipping's paperwork mountain, to history.

How are the wars reshaping trade routes?

The conflicts themselves showed no sign of abating. Greenpeace has identified 540 possible oil spills since the US-Iran conflict began in February, with research suggesting the environmental damage could persist for decades. For tanker owners and their insurers, that is a long-tail liability question, not just an ecological one.

In the Baltic, Ukrainian drones struck the Russian export port of Ust-Luga, setting fire to infrastructure and disrupting power supplies. The attack hits a gateway that handles significant volumes of Russian export cargo, and it reinforces the pattern of infrastructure targeting that has made Black Sea and Baltic tonnage risk premiums a permanent line item.

Is congestion the new normal for box shipping?

MSC chief executive Soren Toft warned that port congestion has become a new normal, with millions of TEU of capacity tied up in delays. That absorbed capacity props up spot rates by removing effective supply, but it also means shippers face longer, less reliable transit times and forwarders must build buffer into schedules that used to run tight.

What did the tech coverage reveal?

A global Microsoft outage exposed shipping's growing dependence on a handful of tech giants — a concentration risk that should worry any CIO whose operations froze with a single vendor's failure. SplashTech also asked whether maritime AI has already become a commodity. Industry leaders argued that proprietary data and maritime expertise, rather than the AI models themselves, will increasingly separate winners from losers. The model layer is commoditizing; the data layer is not.

In the latest Maritime CEO interview, MSM boss Faouzi Fradi argued that shipmanagement's next competitive advantage will be trust rather than size — a notable claim in a sector that has spent two decades consolidating.

What happens next in the Baltic Exchange-Mercuria trial?

The three-week London trial between the Baltic Exchange and Mercuria has concluded, with a verdict expected in the coming months. At stake: whether the world's leading VLCC freight benchmark remained fit for purpose after war erupted in the Middle East. The outcome could reshape how tanker exposure is priced and settled across the derivatives market, given how many FFA contracts reference that benchmark.

Elsewhere, Splash Cruise caught up with expedition veteran Jan Bryde, who after 33 trips to the North Pole is turning his attention to Europe's rivers.

For crews and owners alike, the week's through-line is grim but clear: war risk, wage stagnation and technological dependence are converging, and with congestion locking up millions of TEU and a benchmark-defining verdict pending, none of those pressures looks likely to ease soon.