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The UK has imposed sanctions on Russian insurer Ingosstrakh, a key player in the operation of the Kremlin’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers, as part of a push to tighten measures designed to restrict Moscow’s energy revenues.

Ingosstrakh, a large Russian insurer, has become a significant provider of insurance for vessels in the so-called shadow fleet — the 100 or so mostly ageing tankers Moscow has acquired to transport and sell its oil for more than the $60-a-barrel limit western powers have attempted to impose.

The price cap is intended to allow Russia to keep exporting oil so as to avoid global price spikes that would harm western economies, while squeezing the Kremlin’s revenues. Insurers have been an important lever for enforcing the policy as ships can be required to show adequate insurance, when entering ports in particular.

The FT reported in March alongside Denmark’s Danwatch that Ingosstrakh was insuring shadow fleet vessels, but that the insurance it was providing could be voided if the shipments were breaching the cap. This could potentially saddle coastal states with huge clean-up bills in the event of an oil spill.

Craig Kennedy, an expert on Russian energy based at Harvard, said: “Sanctioning insurers which help the shadow fleet is a way to make it harder for these vessels to operate. But the most important thing for all the G7 countries is to target ships, by name, which we know are part of this evasion network.”

In recent months, ships targeted by US sanctions appear to have become harder for Russia to use to move its oil.

The UK’s sanctions, which restrict dealings with the targeted entities, have also directly designated a number of shadow fleet vessels for the first time. One of them, the 19-year-old Canis Power, broke down last year in the Danish straits in an event that was seen as a warning about the dangers in Russia’s systematic use of old tankers.

These sanctions are the first use of new sanctioning powers passed by the British parliament at the end of May during the legislative “wash-up” in days after the UK called its general election. The new powers allow Britain to target ships with sanctions that “obtain a benefit from or support the government of Russia” or have undermined Ukrainian integrity.

Kennedy said: “The next step should be that we should require ships to make insurance disclosures to prove they are properly covered. If they refuse to do so, and continue to operate, we should add them to the sanctions lists. That way, we can deter ships from operating without good insurance.”

Red Box Energy Services in Singapore, which the FT also revealed was shipping large components from China to Russia for a new liquefied natural gas project, was also sanctioned on Thursday following the US designating the company last month.

The sanctions come as western leaders try to rally support for Ukraine after it faced a number of military setbacks in recent weeks.

Ingosstrakh is part-owned by Italy’s Generali, though the Italian company’s stake has been frozen since shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and it no longer plays a role in the management of the company.

Ingosstrakh has been contacted for comment. The insurer has previously stated that its response to discovering a policyholder was breaching sanctions “will not be different” to “any other international insurer”.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday tossed out a challenge to the FDA’s rules for prescribing and dispensing abortion pills.

Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune/Getty Images

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Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune/Getty Images

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday tossed out a challenge to the FDA’s rules for prescribing and dispensing abortion pills.

Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune/Getty Images

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday tossed out a challenge to the FDA’s rules for prescribing and dispensing abortion pills. By a unanimous vote, the court said the anti-abortion doctors who brought the challenge had failed to show they had been harmed, as they do not prescribe the medication, and thus, essentially, had no skin in the game.

The court said that the challengers, a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, had no right to be in court at all since neither the organization nor its members could show they had suffered any concrete injury.

The court’s action amounted to a legal off-ramp, leaving the FDA rules in place, without directly addressing the regulations themselves.

The court’s decision also avoided, at least for now, a challenge to the entire structure of the FDA’s regulatory power to approve drugs and continually evaluate their safety—a system that for decades has been widely viewed as the gold standard for both safety and innovation.

Since the court reversed Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion in 2022, pills have become the most popular abortion method in the U.S. More than half the women who choose to terminate a pregnancy use a combination of pills approved by the FDA, including mifepristone, manufactured by Danco Laboratories and marketed as Mifeprex.

The pill regimen was first approved 24 years ago, and over the past seven years, the agency has approved changes in the dosing regimen and eliminated some restrictions that it found to be unnecessary. For instance, the pills can now be prescribed during the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, instead of the original seven weeks, and prescriptions can be filled by mail or at pharmacies, instead of at a doctor’s office. The result, according to Danco Labs, is that there have been fewer complications than when the drug was initially approved for just seven weeks in 2000.

Thursday’s Supreme Court decision reversed a ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, widely viewed as the most conservative federal appeals court in the country.

Siding with the FDA in the case were virtually all the major medical associations in the country, as well as almost all the pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies, big and small, that are regulated by the agency, making this the rare case in which a government regulator and the industry it regulates were on the same side. Dr. Jeremy Levin, the CEO of Ovid Therapeutics, one of the many pharmaceutical companies that sided with the FDA, earlier this year called the case “a dagger at the heart of the entire industry.”

For now, though, the prospect of dismantling the regulatory powers of the FDA has been averted. But the direct challenge to abortion pills and their accessibility has not been resolved, and could be revived in a different case.

More than 14,000 Texas patients crossed the border into New Mexico for an abortion last year. An additional 16,000 left Southern states bound for Illinois. And nearly 12,000 more traveled north from South Carolina and Georgia to North Carolina.

These were among the more than 171,000 patients who traveled for an abortion in 2023, new estimates show, demonstrating both the upheaval in access since the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the limits of state bans to stop the procedure. The data also highlights the unsettled nature of an issue that will test politicians up and down the ballot in November.

Out-of-state travel for abortions — either to have a procedure or obtain abortion pills — more than doubled in 2023 compared with 2019, and made up nearly a fifth of recorded abortions.

Most traveling patients went to the next closest state that allowed abortions. But those in the South, where 13 states banned or restricted the procedure, had to go farther.

One traveler was a 24-year-old woman from Columbus, Ga., who asked to be identified by only her first initial, A. She flew to New York City last summer after discovering she was past six weeks of pregnancy, when Georgia no longer allows abortion.

She decided to travel over a weekend instead of self-managing with pills at home. “I had to go back to work on Monday,” she said. “I just didn’t have that kind of time.”

Texas, the largest state to ban abortion, had the most residents travel across state lines for the procedure, the data shows.

On the receiving end, nowhere saw more out-of-state patients — and from more states — than Illinois.

People in states where the procedure remained legal also traveled for abortions, sometimes because the closest clinic was across state lines or the influx of out-of-state patients made appointments scarce. The data shows that abortions rose in nearly every state where they remained legal.

Many traveling patients faced multiday trips, lost income and child care costs. Some patients were unable to travel. Earlier research found that in the first half of 2023, almost a quarter of women living in states with near-total bans — who may have otherwise sought an abortion — did not get one.

“Abortion is one of the most common procedures in medicine,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder of Whole Woman’s Health, which runs clinics in Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia.

“We’re having people travel hundreds or thousands of miles for a procedure that typically takes less than 10 minutes and can be done in a doctor’s office setting,” she said. “Nobody does that for any other medical procedure.”

The new estimates of resident and out-of-state abortions come from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, and they offer the first detailed picture of the interstate travelers who helped push the number of abortions nationwide to a high in 2023. The researchers surveyed a sample of clinics in each state where abortion remained legal to estimate the number of abortions.

For some anti-abortion groups, the feeling of victory after the overturn of Roe has been dimmed by the number of people circumventing abortion bans — and the lack of political will to address the issue in an election year.

“We’re agitating some of the Republicans who would be very comfortable spiking the football, patting themselves on the back, running for re-election, and then focusing on other issues that they’re more interested in,” said John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life.

“We’ve never had a sense of finality. We’ve only seen the other side escalate their efforts to promote abortion,” he added.

The availability of abortion pills has significantly blunted the impact of many state bans. But some patients still must travel to see a provider because of a medical condition or how far along they are in pregnancy. Others simply prefer it.

“I didn’t want the pills to get delivered to my school,” said Mia, 20, a college student in Houston who asked to be identified by only her first name. Instead, last August, she drove 12 hours to an Albuquerque clinic. “In case anything went wrong, I didn’t know if I could go to a hospital,” she said. “I figured it would be best to go in person and that way I’d know that it was taken care of.”

The clinic covered the procedure’s cost, but Mia paid around $500 for gas, two nights at an Airbnb and Uber rides to get to and from her appointment.

The explosion of out-of-state travel has been met with support from abortion clinics and abortion funds, which expanded access to services and financial support for patients.

“Now we have places where people who’ve been driving all night can nap in our clinics,” said Ms. Hagstrom Miller. “We have couches. We have waiting rooms specifically for children, with toys. We bring in sandwiches and food.”

States with liberal abortion laws have also played a significant role.

“It looks like the protective policies that the states are enacting do matter,” said Kelly Baden, the vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute. “But we should not be normalizing the reliance on networks of volunteers and donations.”

Illinois has invested upwards of $23 million into expanding abortion access and reproductive health care since 2022. Providers in the state have extended clinic hours and increased staffing and the availability of hospital-based abortion care.

“Things are running along very smoothly,” said Dr. Allison Cowett, the medical director at Family Planning Associates, a Chicago clinic whose patient volume has doubled since 2018. “We’ve caught up to the speed of things. This is our new normal.”

The Chicago Abortion Fund provides, on average, about $880 to each patient seeking an abortion in Illinois, up from around $545 in 2022, thanks to donations and city and state grants.

“It still feels precarious — you don’t know when the priority of a single institution or a single foundation will change,” said Megan Jeyifo, the fund’s executive director.

In Florida, the fight over abortion restrictions is far from over, with consequences for women across the South. The state had an 18 percent rise in abortions last year, including nearly 10,000 out-of-state patients.

A six-week ban that took effect in May has already upended those patterns, and advocates are asking voters to preserve abortion rights in the state’s Constitution in November.

For now, the closest state offering abortions later than six weeks in pregnancy is North Carolina, which requires counseling and a 72-hour waiting period.

“It’s a logistical nightmare,” said Kelly Flynn, the chief executive of A Woman’s Choice, which has clinics in Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. To save patients two trips out of Florida, physicians at her Florida clinic are licensed in North Carolina so that they can perform the mandatory counseling before the patient travels north.