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Danger! Suspicious Russian Ships in the North and Baltic Seas

They circle around critical infrastructure, sometimes by cutting off their geolocation. Dozens of Russian “research” vessels have been spotted doing suspicious activities in the North and Baltic Seas.

What are all these Russian vessels looking for off the European coast in the North and Baltic Seas? These research vessels look more like spy or sabotage vessels than scientific vessels. Several of these vessels have also disconnected their mandatory geolocation. The suspicion is all the more stronger since they have been spotted near critical infrastructure since the start of the war in Ukraine. These findings are linked to an investigation bringing together German, Belgian, British, Estonian, Dutch and Scandinavian media*.

Morse code messages

Journalists and maritime tracking sites have traced the routes of all Russian ships in the North Sea, from simple fishing boats to container ships since February 2022, focusing mainly on 72 "specialized" Russian ships. These investigators were also able to intercept Morse coded messages, hence the suspicion of irregular activities, a priori of tracking and espionage. In any case, 16 of these ships had at least 60 peculiar activities. On 8 occassions they entered territorial waters. In addition, some "civilian" boats had crew members (soldiers?) armed like military personnel!

Northseal soon to be operational

On the authorities side, there's an awareness of these Russian maritime patrols. From 2025, the NorthSeal platform will be in operation. This is a surveillance and information exchange project involving Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom and Denmark. One of its objectives is to collaborate between states for better security of critical infrastructures in the North Sea. For its part, NATO has also set up increased surveillance of the coasts and (sub)marine infrastructures with the collaboration of the energy and telecommunications operators concerned.

* The media participating in this survey are VRT NWS (Belgium), KRO-NCRV (Netherlands), NDR-WDR en Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), NRK (Norway), ERR (Estonia) with the help of the following for data collection: DR (Denmark), Yle (Finland); SVT (Sweden), BBC (United Kingdom), Marineschepen.nl, Vake.ai, Marinetraffic.com and Dossier Centre.

(Olivier Duquesne – Sources: VRT & 7sur7.be – Picture: © Wikipedia - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license - А.Бричевский)

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