Accidents, Not Sabotage, Likely Damaged Baltic Undersea Cables, Say US and European Intelligence Officials (stripes.com) 84
The Washington Post reports:
Ruptures of undersea cables that have rattled European security officials in recent months were likely the result of maritime accidents rather than Russian sabotage, according to several U.S. and European intelligence officials.
The determination reflects an emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services, according to senior officials from three countries involved in ongoing investigations of a string of incidents in which critical seabed energy and communications lines have been severed... [S]o far, officials said, investigations involving the United States and a half-dozen European security services have turned up no indication that commercial ships suspected of dragging anchors across seabed systems did so intentionally or at the direction of Moscow. Instead, U.S. and European officials said that the evidence gathered to date — including intercepted communications and other classified intelligence — points to accidents caused by inexperienced crews serving aboard poorly maintained vessels.
U.S. officials cited "clear explanations" that have come to light in each case indicating a likelihood that the damage was accidental, and a lack of evidence suggesting Russian culpability. Officials with two European intelligence services said that they concurred with U.S. assessments. Despite initial suspicions that Russia was involved, one European official said there is "counter evidence" suggesting otherwise. The U.S. and European officials declined to elaborate and spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of ongoing investigations...
A Nordic official briefed on the investigation said conditions on the tanker were abysmal. "We've always gone out with the assumption that shadow fleet vessels are in bad shape," the official said. "But this was even worse than we thought...." European security officials said that Finland's main intelligence service is in agreement with Western counterparts that the Dec. 25 incident appears to have been an accident, though they cautioned that it may be impossible to rule out a Russian role.
The article points out another reason Russia might not want to draw attention to the waterways around NATO countries. Doing so "could endanger oil smuggling operations Russia has relied on to finance the war in Ukraine, and possibly provoke more aggressive efforts by Western governments to choke off Russia's route to the North Atlantic."
The determination reflects an emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services, according to senior officials from three countries involved in ongoing investigations of a string of incidents in which critical seabed energy and communications lines have been severed... [S]o far, officials said, investigations involving the United States and a half-dozen European security services have turned up no indication that commercial ships suspected of dragging anchors across seabed systems did so intentionally or at the direction of Moscow. Instead, U.S. and European officials said that the evidence gathered to date — including intercepted communications and other classified intelligence — points to accidents caused by inexperienced crews serving aboard poorly maintained vessels.
U.S. officials cited "clear explanations" that have come to light in each case indicating a likelihood that the damage was accidental, and a lack of evidence suggesting Russian culpability. Officials with two European intelligence services said that they concurred with U.S. assessments. Despite initial suspicions that Russia was involved, one European official said there is "counter evidence" suggesting otherwise. The U.S. and European officials declined to elaborate and spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of ongoing investigations...
A Nordic official briefed on the investigation said conditions on the tanker were abysmal. "We've always gone out with the assumption that shadow fleet vessels are in bad shape," the official said. "But this was even worse than we thought...." European security officials said that Finland's main intelligence service is in agreement with Western counterparts that the Dec. 25 incident appears to have been an accident, though they cautioned that it may be impossible to rule out a Russian role.
The article points out another reason Russia might not want to draw attention to the waterways around NATO countries. Doing so "could endanger oil smuggling operations Russia has relied on to finance the war in Ukraine, and possibly provoke more aggressive efforts by Western governments to choke off Russia's route to the North Atlantic."
Hanlon's Razor, sort of (Score:5, Insightful)
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Re:Hanlon's Razor, sort of (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, Mr. not ruling out invading Panama, Greenland and maybe Canada is "toning down all the war mongering"? You're serious?
Re:Hanlon's Razor, sort of (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't take malice. But given previous stunts of tapping undersea cables, it could have been a failed tap attempt. See:
https://www.theatlantic.com/in... [theatlantic.com]
Re:Hanlon's Razor, sort of (Score:4)
That doesn't track. These failed tap attempts would be tied perfectly in time to ship movements over the cables where ships didn't even stop. You propose divers being under water readying their taps without surface support vessels waiting for exactly when the ship dragging an anchor comes past?
Also one of them was a power cable.
Re:Hanlon's Razor, sort of (Score:4, Interesting)
What happened to the stories of a shadow fleet of "soviet" tankers, and the one that dragged anchor and broke the cables, that was boarded and seized by Finland, was chock full of spy electronics in a dedicated deck staffed by Russian technos?
I think I have whiplash.
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It's almost as if you've been lied to about Russia! A lot!
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Oh look, a Russian liar right here. You will go unnoticed under this troll article.
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It never really made much sense. Why attack those cables now? All it did was make life harder for the Russian shadow fleet, which it needs for economic reasons. It didn't help with any on-going conflict, and only made cutting them in future more difficult.
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It was just there to act as a diversion from events in Ukraine now that the Middle east is exhausted.
Expect the Baltic states to be targeted more by Russia.
Re:Hanlon's Razor, sort of (Score:5, Informative)
The "shadow fleet" is well known, [wikipedia.org] , of course Russia has ships to get around western sanctions. What did we think would happen?
And severing or damage to undersea cables by ships is a common event, perhaps hundreds of incidents per year. So when you see a cluster, maybe it is a conspiracy, or maybe apply Hanlon's Razor.
The spy equipment on the Eagle S is little more than a rumour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You might as well ask what happened to the UFO fleet that was terrorising the US a couple of months ago. [wikipedia.org]
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You might as well ask what happened to the UFO fleet that was terrorising the US a couple of months ago.
Oh, that's easy. It exceeded the five-minute attention span of social media users and they went on to obsess over something else for the next five minutes, before switching to ...
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What happened to the stories of a shadow fleet of "soviet" tankers, and the one that dragged anchor and broke the cables, that was boarded and seized by Finland, was chock full of spy electronics in a dedicated deck staffed by Russian technos?
I think I have whiplash.
Nothing happened. The fact that the fleet exists and that one was spying may have everything to do with undersea cables being cut, or may have nothing to do with it. The investigation showed it had nothing to do with it.
A basic bit of strategy should come into your thought as well: You have a shadow fleet, it's loaded with spying equipment. Do you a) keep a low profile an carry on spying? or b) cut a cable therefore guaranteeing a coastguard response and your vessel being inspected?
Option b doesn't make a l
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Option B is for testing the readiness and response.
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My thoughts as well. But I subscribe to a modified Hanlon's razor: "Sometimes attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence."
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The skilled saboteurs makes it look like incompetence.
Wait, what? (Score:1)
It wasn't 4 Ukrainians and a sailboat?
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
some common sense for a change (Score:2, Insightful)
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surprised they have actually come to an intelligent conclusion rather than the usual conspiracy garbage.
They already got the propaganda mileage from the conspiracy theory, it no longer serves much purpose. And the conspiracy theory will continue to have legs as you can tell by the people here who refuse to believe it wasn't deliberate.
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More like the propaganda no longer works. Nobody cared. You can only get caught telling so many lies before people stop believing.
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They already got the propaganda mileage from the conspiracy theory, it no longer serves much purpose. And the conspiracy theory will continue to have legs as you can tell by the people here who refuse to believe it wasn't deliberate.
Our rogue intelligence agencies have been caught lying to us about all sorts of stuff. Why should we believe them about anything anymore?
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Yes, it did serve them the advantage of showing that they can cut off the Baltic states from Western Europe if they want to.
Right (Score:5, Insightful)
Three cables, all mysteriously severed within a month, by ships dragging their anchors for miles and miles.
One of the ships was loaded with spy equipment.
Just coincidence.
Re:Right (Score:4, Interesting)
yeah you have to wonder if this is some kind of 4D chess, but what gambit would involve playing like they don't realize it was sabotage? As TFA alludes, attention in the Baltic is beneficial to NATO so I'd almost expect the opposite - pretend they do believe it was sabotage if they don't.
I guess this is why I'm not a politician/diplomat/spy
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but what gambit would involve playing like they don't realize it was sabotage?
The obvious one that Western governments have been playing for years now. The one where, no matter how many provocations Russia enacts, they ignore them to avoid needing to go to war against Russia. So Russia can meddle in elections, spread disinformation, sabotage equipment, commit all manner of state-sponsored computer crimes, flaunt sanctions, cause massive ecological disasters while flaunting sanctions, plant bombs in packages bound for Western aircraft, threaten nuclear war, literally declare war on th
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Here is a though you might not have had: This could have been a professional investigation and they could just have literally published the results. Yes, I know, shocking and rare in the US and from today on will not be happening there again, but in the EU, truth still has value. And, unlike politically opportune lies, truth helps solve problems.
Re:Right (Score:5, Interesting)
They're de-escalating. It's a convenient lie like "resigning for personal reasons". They don't want the populace to be angrier or more in panic than already. Yesterday we got the news they're deploying unmanned vessels and some AI thing to monitor vessels and cables. If they though these were accidents and coincidences, which historical records have shown to be extremely rare, it would not be economically rational to invest millions continuously for monitoring. The fact they're investing tens of millions into continuous monitoring is evidence they think it can happen again in the short term.
Re: Right (Score:2)
Regardless of whether it's accidental, these drones will make it possible to hold people accountable for damaging these cables. I'm not saying it's a guarantee of accountability, but the first step of getting there is determining how it happened.
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Yesterday we got the news they're deploying unmanned vessels and some AI thing to monitor vessels and cables.
Whether it's sabotage or incompetence / carelessness - deploying monitoring with the goal of reducing the frequency of cable cuts makes sense.
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If you want to de-escalate you can have their shadow fleet of oil tankers mysteriously lose power when their engines explode. Since the ships aren't theirs they can't complain when their revenue plunges.
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The real coincidence is that it's suddenly not Russia's fault on the eve of Trump's inauguration.
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You think? What if they just published the _actual_ results of the investigation? Yes, I known in banana-republics like the US this does not happen, but this is the EU and truth still has value.
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In EU, truth is hate speech, and therefore strictly banned via harsh criminal prosecution, large fines and lengthy prison sentences.
That said, this is Finland, not EU that's investigating. And here truth still carries significant value in spite of elites slowly pushing us to EU standards. But the investigation is ongoing, so we don't actually know what happened yet. But Swedes did recover the anchor of the latest ship, and it's clearly what severed the cables. Add to this the fact that ship dragging the anc
Re:Right (Score:4, Interesting)
The delicious irony of Russiagate: calling everyone else conspiracy theorists while you make up new ones yourself every day on the fly.
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And then there are the real Russian trolls such as you.
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Fuck off asshole.
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Yes - I read those stories too. Finland boarded and seized at least one of those shadow fleet tankers suspected of purposefully dragging anchor to break cables.
i mean, was it real or not? I feel like a dog being walked, being lead to whatever info Im supposed to see today.
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It was real. And now they found that the crew was likely just being stupid and incompetent and did not realize. I mean, they were pretty obvious about it of it had been intentional and there really is nothing to gain for Russia by alerting the EU to the danger.
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This is a lie. No such finding was published. Investigation is ongoing, and latest stage is that Swedes went and picked up the anchor. The trench it created shows it severed the cables.
Marinetraffic.com clearly shows that dropped anchor slowed the ship to a crawl for a long period of time. There's no way to just "not notice" it, and standard procedure when this sort of thing happens is to circle around to the anchor and pick it up, not just keep dragging it at really slow speed that is all your ship can do
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Are you functionally illiterate? I answered to whether the story if Finnland boarding a vessel was real. It was. The thing about spy equipment was not what I answered to and that is a fabrication.
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One of the ships was loaded with spy equipment.
Just coincidence.
Yes a coincidence makes the most sense. If you are running a spy ship as part of a shadow fleet, would you a) keep running this ship gathering military intelligence, or b) cut a cable thereby guaranteeing a coast guard response and detecting and impounding your spy ship?
The mark of a good conspiracy theory is that it makes sense and benefits the conspirators. If this *wasn't* a ship loaded with spy gear you'd have a far better conspiracy theory than having a ship with spy gear. It would be like America purp
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Indeed. And that is why there was no spy equipment found. But the useful idiots latching onto conspiracy theories are just that: Idiots. And that is why even an abysmally stupid like this one works on many people.
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One of the ships was loaded with spy equipment.
What "spy equipment"? Is this something Trump hallucinated?
Oil smuggling? (Score:3)
The article points out another reason Russia might not want to draw attention to the waterways around NATO countries. Doing so "could endanger oil smuggling operations Russia has relied on to finance the war in Ukraine, and possibly provoke more aggressive efforts by Western governments to choke off Russia's route to the North Atlantic."
Oil tankers are lumbering beasts. How difficult could it be to track them from space and inspect them to make sure they're legit?
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>it is difficult to distinguish intent from incompetence.
Most legal systems, if not all, have a principle of "ignorance of the law is no excuse".
A ship's captain - and anyone on the vessel with authority - ought to know there are cables around to be damaged and that they will be held responsible if they damage them. We hold airline pilots responsible for knowing their aircraft and current flying conditions including where they shouldn't be flying at all, we can have similar standards for people with au
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Here's an idea, setup something like a volleyball net underwater. Any ships draging an anchor will break the "net " first.
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Marinetraffic.com
Enjoy tracking every single tanker in the world in near real time with full history.
Re: Oil smuggling? (Score:2)
You'd need a starlink style constellation, and each bird would need to be equipped with some powerful ground facing optics. Starlink has no such equipment.
The 1998 movie Enemy of the State is purely fiction. We did not and still do not have satellites capable of doing that. Starlink is the first that *possibly* could, but it's ill-equipped. To spy on anything with a satellite otherwise, have to have a good idea of where it will be months in advance.
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For Starlink you need a low orbit to reduce latency and you need a lot of them to provide uninterrupted coverage.
Unless you only care about weather observation, you need to be in a LEO orbit.
For surveillance the coverage only needs to be updated enough to see events of interest. If your interest is in slow moving oil tankers then one update a day is probably enough and I think some surveillance satellites can cover the whole globe in hours. It doesn't take a lot of processing power pick out large vessels on the ocean from images, so much of the tracking process could be automated. I'm not saying it is trivial but rather very doable if you have money and motivation i.e. your are a government tracking a potential adversary.
All it would take is for your boat to move a few kilometers in the right direction and that bird loses the ability to see it. Unless your bird has enough fuel to change orbits on a whim.
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besides, there is no smuggling going on, it's just one country commercing with another, and a third party that has no say in the matter attempting to object about such commerce
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Could you please cite the international law allowing you to inspect a vessel as long as it is not in your territorial waters? And they are all legit, they are not registered as Russian ships, but for example are registered in Panama, as is most of the fleet of western countries. Russia is doing what it can to make it as hard as possible to know, if a ship is owned by them for obvious reasons, so just because you see some ship leaving a Russian port does not mean, that is part of the shadow fleet, it could b
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International law? What is that?
In other news, people pushing "simple" solutions universally overlook really important factors.
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Actually very difficult. Despite what popular movies have you believe we don't have a global spy system that can track in realtime the position of every thing on the planet. And what do you mean by "legit"? They are "legit". The shadow fleet is just an oil fleet that moves product between buyers and sellers. Their existence isn't illegal, they are just there to stop the ability to track source of oil as the receiving country may need plausible deniability if they want to onsell the product. There's little b
Or it was another possible Ukrainian-linked op... (Score:1)
... like the sabotaging of the Nord Stream Pipeline [wsj.com], and the western intelligence agencies are coming up with 'explanations' to cover for Ukraine so public opinion in the countries impacted doesn't turn against Ukraine.
What better way to choke Russia's income stream than by incriminating their 'shadow fleet' and exposing it to the world?
Either way, I have a hard time believing these were all 'accidents'.
Source? (Score:1)
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It looks like it was originally in the Washington Post, then reprinted in Stars and Stripes (stripes.com).
The byline lists three Post reporters.
Re: Source? (Score:1)
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WaPo gaslighting with anonymous sources (Score:5, Informative)
But even those didn't say what the /. summary purports.
The article stated that it is difficult to prove intent.
The Fins on the other hand seem to be quite confident that they can.
https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com]
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Re:WaPo gaslighting with anonymous sources (Score:5, Interesting)
But even those didn't say what the /. summary purports.
The article stated that it is difficult to prove intent.
The Fins on the other hand seem to be quite confident that they can. https://www.reuters.com/world/... [reuters.com]
If you want to drop the anchor on a ship this size (Eagle S), you need several crewmembers to cooperate. It will make a noice that everyone on the ship notices. It simply does not happen by accident. Furthermore, those marine cables are marked on the charts for a reason - it is strictly forbidden to use an anchor near those locations.
Dragging your anchor for tens of miles does not happen without an intent.
The Finns don't agree, even if WaPo says they do. (Score:5, Informative)
https://yle.fi/a/74-20137924 [yle.fi]
And the Finns should have the most informatoin
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Finnish National Bureau of Investigation lead investigator Sami Liimatainen says he wasn't contacted by WaPo, which published a story earlier today claiming that an emerging consensus among U.S. and European security services holds that recent Baltic seabed cable damage was accidental.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20137924 [yle.fi]
And the Finns should have the most informatoin
Huh. Almost as if our intelligence agencies were untrustworthy, eh?
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Also from the Finnish news: The police is investigating this as a crime, the ship is being held back both for the criminal investigation, and now also for a private suit from the cable owners. 9 members of the crew are forbidden to leave the country (a bit less severe than getting arrested). They have found traces of a dragging anchor that are over 100km long, and the anchor itself right where the ship was stopped. Even if they can not prove it intentional sabotage, the ship owner is still responsible for
Does it really matter? (Score:3)
It seems like a Russian ship is the most likely source of the damage, the only question is whether it was intentional or accidental. But does that really matter? Either way, the damage is identical. I'd quote a variation on Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."
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It matters. If it was intentional, then there was a set-up, a chain of command and an intent. If it was an accident, it was just people too stupid to run a ship running a ship. If you look at some maritime accidents, the latter seems to be not that uncommon.
great piece of propaganda (Score:1)
there is no such thing as a country "smuggling" goods when commercing with another country.
the US / west have no say in the matter. they're not the international commerce police, no matter what they pretend being
Right. (Score:2)
So they slipped, fell, and dragged the anchor through the seabed on accident. For several hours. Multiple times.
It's like how my sisters ex-husband just accidentally slipped, fell, lost all his clothes and then happened to stick his dick into another woman multiple times, too. Whom also happened to be nude at the time.
Credibility: Zero.
Ah (Score:1)
according to several U.S. and European intelligence officials
Ah. The same guys who said that Hunter's laptop was a Russian op.
Checks out.
A misleading headline and mounting evidence (Score:2)
Does the substantiated content of this very article match the headline?
Who is going on the record, versus those speaking anonymously? Are the intelligence officials who say it's just accidents ever named in the article, versus the extensive part of the article where identified experts speak out to say there's extensive evidence for sabotage, and vanishingly small probabilities for it all being accidental? Named versus unnamed sources don't just tip the scales of credibility, they bring the nature of the s