Estonian Cargo ship sinks off Odessa after explosion, crew members missing | Hacker News Reader

Estonian Cargo ship sinks off Odessa after explosion, crew members missing

reuters.com

148 points2-718-281-82864 comments

Here is the latest local news on this (in Russian, this is russian-language news site in Odessa): https://dumskaya.net/news/v-chernom-more-vblizi-odessy-spasl...

Fortunately all 6 crew members seems to be safe (4 of them are Russians IIRC).

That is a relief!

My theory is that Russians forced the ship to go to Odessa to check if the passage is mined.

They got their answer and it cost them nothing.

Another of those situations where I want to upvote your comment and downvote the world we live in, because it's terribly likely.

was cracking my knuckles, caps-lock on active, ready go full "well-ac-tu-ally" ... then realized I can't make up my mind if "Hanlon's razor" holds up during time of war or if it's actually flipped on it's head.

The chances of this being right is quite good, provided we ignore all the other common-sense things they missed but should have done if they weren't half arsing the whole thing?

This was the HELT:

https://www.fleetmon.com/vessels/helt_8402589_13482004/

https://www.fleetmon.com/maritime-news/2022/37489/estonian-f...

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:35...

Fleetmon is a super cool site. Thanks for sharing.

Their offers are a bit expensive but the live tracking is great:

https://www.fleetmon.com/services/live-tracking/fleetmon-exp...

Be careful with AIS data right now, it's easy to spoof and has been spoofed on the black sea very recently.

https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/hackers-deface-ai...

edit: Website seems down on my side, archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220303180437/https://www.marit...

That’s dangerously close to attacking a Nato country…

I am curious whether it is deliberate to test what happens.

Russia seems to have run out of precision-guided munitions on the first day of the war, so I personally doubt it.

Is that true that they've run out of them or have they just shifted to not using them?

Maybe but it seems more like they're embarrassed by their lack of progress so are just shelling civilian areas to try force a surrender...

It seems like if they could have taken out Ukraine's remaining TB2 drones, they would have.

Would the registration flag on the ship make a difference here? Many ships use the Panama flag. Being owned by an Estonian company isn't immediately obvious. (I haven't seen photos, maybe it was immediately obvious). That said of course no cargo ship should be attacked.

If it's a mine, it's impossible to control who it "attacks".

From the article:

"Ilves said the vessel might have struck a mine."

My guess is that those mines were put out by Ukraine military to fend off the invasion, but the article doesn't say.

Previously there were reports that the Russians forced the ship to cover them as "human shield": https://www.jpost.com/international/article-699109

Reports by the Ukrainian military. TBH, many of the direct reports put out by the Ukrainian military have later been retracted.

For instance, Ukrainian military claimed that tank that drove over civilian car in Kyiv was Russian, but it was Ukrainian.

Wait how did that happen. Was it a mistake on the tank crew's part?

The tank was maneuvering at high speed because it was engaged in a firefight and briefly lost control. Nobody was seriously injured.

IIRC it looked like a BMP backing up into a roadway. If it was buttoned up then at best the vehicle commander might have a glimpse of a car. The driver never saw it, just felt a shift in vehicle level. If it was Ukrainian I don't see an excuse to fail to have a ground guide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_development

Source?

From what I've read the Russians said that they didn't use this type of vehicle in that location and it didn't carry their markings. But see my other comment to parent.

> For instance, Ukrainian military claimed that tank that drove over civilian car in Kyiv was Russian, but it was Ukrainian.

IIRC, they claimed that it was an Ukrainian Strela-10 that was captured by an illegal combatant. Regardless, I just wanted to point at that piece of information without claiming that it was true.

I am not sure how much I would trust the Ukraine military on matters that make Russia look bad. However it's last port call was Chornomorsk/Odessa at 20 Feb, and it doesn't seem like the best time to leave. So I assume they left for a reason. Odessa seems to be still under Ukrainian control, but there have been reports that it would be Russia's next target, so it's possible it was trying to avoid the invasion.

I also would be careful with AIS data right now, it's easy to spoof and has been done so very recently in the black sea (https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/hackers-deface-ai...)

In the same vein it's possible that the Russians decided that they don't want that ship to possibly resupply the Ukrainians and therefore decided to shoot it. We won't know for sure until the dust settles.

The ship (supposedly) entered a Ukrainian port on the 20th of February. So any resupplying would have been done already. It's possible that they expected Ukraine to use it to smuggle something out of the country, but I find it hard to imagine what that could be.

Occam's razor they struck a mine

From a video it’s obvious that it wasn’t due to a mine. Supposedly locals say the ship was parked there for days prior to being hit.

Could a mine have broken loose from its anchor and drifted into the ship?

Indeed. Russia will probably claim that the crew jumped the ship after setting off a bomb just to make a scene, though...

Please don't spread misinformation about a war.

It's not misinformation. It's not even information. It's a sarcastic comment.

How is it sarcasitc?

The fantasy premise, with "probably" along with the "..." at the end, strongly suggests sarcasm with an obvious negative tone and negative being implied about Russia generally.

It's exceptionally clear they were not spreading misinformation, they did not structure the comment as a factual statement.

The ellipsis seemed like a dead giveaway.

A prediction is an opinion that can be right or wrong and does not qualify as misinformation in any form.

That is a dangerous bunch of presumptions:

1. Presuming the boat was attacked. 2. Presuming it was the Russian (or I'm presuming you did lol) 3. Based on the previous two presuming it was not an accident, and 4. Presuming apologies and compensations would not be issued in case it was.

It definitely is a dangerous bunch of presumptions. We start investigating based on presumptions, though.

> We start investigating based on presumptions

No, you start investigating based on available facts.

Like an active war in the region, Russian warships in the vicinity, a history of aggressive action towards neighboring states?

Don't be pedant, especially when it doesn't even make sense.

I'm not being a pedant. Presumptions and assumptions are how we got into this mess in the first place.

It's also a sign we are through the looking glass and into a non-Geneva world again, because this is even uglier than Saddam's human shield, and comparable to the (ultimately unprovable but plausible) allegation that the British allowed the RMS Lusitania to remain at risk of U-boat attack in order to drag the USA into WW1.

It is undisputed that the British were using the Lusitania to transport war munitions and thus American passengers were effectively human shields. Whether the British allowed the Lusitania to remain at risk or not, they were putting neutral civilian lives in peril through that conduct.

Well I think that bit about the mixed cargo might sort of be a retrospective projection onto a common mixed use of a liner, even in wartime. I don't think one can say with any certainty that other liners did not do this. Post-Lusitania, line operators might have refused it as a general rule, but those were early days of submarine warfare.

I do think (as a Brit) that the argument they were deliberately left unprotected from U-boats has significant credibility; I would not be at all surprised. I am not a pacifist at this stage of my life, but I am regularly surprised at what my fellow Brits in particular do not know about our military history.

Then again, in this country, schoolkids don't generally study the First World War until they are of an age where the boys among them would have been illicitly signing up for it, and by that age, studying history is optional.

So this is what, the 4th ship in a week?

https://twitter.com/NavyLookout/status/1497495556683411457

https://twitter.com/NavyLookout/status/1497247647597486088

Remember the Helt!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)

Is this an Article 5 breach?

No.

They ran into a sea mine. It's an unfortunate accident.

Breach of NATO article 5 would be if a NATO country or countries refused to assist after NATO members agreed that a collective response should be invoked after an armed attack on a NATO member.

Here's a tweet adding some context: https://twitter.com/PeterZeihan/status/1499425411717079048

tl;dr: this is going to affect insurance availability, which will in turn affect what can be exported from Russian ports in the Black Sea.

If true, this effect is underappreciated while everybody's focusing on whether it's an act with implications for NATO. According to that commentator it could impact 1.5 million barrels/day of Russian oil, since now only Russian state-owned vessels would be able to ship it.

There's going to be a ton of due diligence on all these. Eventually it will be determined that Russia didn't intend to do it. It was some newb who shouldn't have shot. Won't matter. Eventually Article 5 will be triggered by Russia. That's the problem about the fog of war.

Probably a fuel leak somewhere.

And we should stick to that.

That would be one of the biggest coincidences if true.

> Ilves said the vessel might have struck a mine.

From the article.

Don't know if that's the ship [1], but it does look like there are cargo ships that are being shot at.

[1] https://youtu.be/x22Kg4pCXD4

Two bullets to the back of the head while jumping from a ten story building.

Thank you for the enlightenment Vlad.

Upvoted, because at least I saw it was a joke...

I don't know, I live right next to where this was happening, what I've heard seemed like artillery fire (not an expert though, but I probable will soon be).

Maybe the ship accidentally fell from a balcony? :D

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