Floating megabomb heaves to near the English coast
cepa.org
cepa.org
This bears repeating. Russia has bee actively engaged in low-intensity warfare with the west for decades, and has single-handledly escalated their aggression towards the west in general but western Europe in particular for the last couple of years to the point they overtly and very publicly threaten the world with all sorts of attacks and global annihilation.
Once Russia tries to casually float a massive bomb right into your doorstep, only a massive moron would not mitigate the risk presented by Russia, even if considered implausible.
The ship has been featured extensively in Danish and Norwegian media. First the Russians attempted to get the explosive ship close to a NATO base in Norway before the Norwegian coast guard chased them away. The Danish coast guard also had to confront them.
The ship contains several times more Ammonium Nitrate than what caused the 2020 Beirut port explosion.
> However even on this basis, comparing the actual energy yields of a large nuclear device and an explosion of TNT can be slightly inaccurate. Small TNT explosions, especially in the open, don't tend to burn the carbon-particle and hydrocarbon products of the explosion. Gas-expansion and pressure-change effects tend to "freeze" the burn rapidly. A large open explosion of TNT may maintain fireball temperatures high enough so that some of those products do burn up with atmospheric oxygen [...]
See also the "Relative effectiveness factor" paragraph [1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#Relative_effect...
No, it likely wouldn't do as much damage as an airburst nuke. But it would be catastrophic nonetheless.
That's a red herring. No one is looking at the decimal places. The comparison serves to provide a real-world benchmark of the expectable destructive power of the cargo held by this vessel, and a relative comparison of how big it would be. Arguing otherwise is idiotic.
But these are highly oversimplified number games. For example, it's highly doubtful someone could get this to explode all at once without dispersing most of it - even if they were actively trying to cause maximum damage. Nonetheless it's still a monumental safety risk and any port in their right mind would do well to shoo this piece of crap back to Russia.
Citation, please.
This needs more explanation, does this mean the captain refused? Or Russian port authorities refused? Or they just... chose to limp in a particular direction?
From another article [0]:
> Not long after leaving the Russian port of Kandalaksha in late August, the general cargo vessel ran aground in a storm in Norwegian waters and a Port State inspection in Norway confirmed cracks in the hull and damage to the ship’s propeller and rudder.
[0] https://theloadstar.com/baltic-ports-bar-damaged-ruby-now-in...
Of course I have no real info on why but it does seem plausible that returning would be unattractive.
Your hypothesis is quickly rejected/proven to be bullshit by the fact that the travel distance that the ship took after being rejected by Norway was greater than the distance it would need to take to get to a Russian port.
And instead the ship planted itself where? Right in the middle of the English channel? We're talking about hitting ports from Norway, Lithuania, and now UK/France/Belgium?
The ship goes to nearest port for repairs. But when the nature of the cargo is understood, it is asked to leave.
It chooses to head south to Russia via the Baltic instead of north into the artic. A reasonable safer course.
Then Denmark denies it passage through the straights into the Baltic, so it now has to either head north again or carry on.
It arranges to get to Malta, a place that makes its business in ship repairs.
Seems reasonable actually.
What do you think they should do, camp in international waters outside Murmansk in a dead-end of the Arctic, hoping a Russian port authority relents, until winter comes in full force and they're ultrafucked rather than just a bit fucked? Have you looked at a map?
The ship ran aground between Norway and Russia, seeked emergency shelter in Tromsø. The ship has damanges on it propellors and rudder. It anchored up near Tromsø for while until the port authorities and governments told the ship to leave due to security concern. Basically the ship stayed outside a small populated island, and it was determined the island would be blown flat if something happened.
The Norwegian government are likely extra nerveous about this, just a small amount of the same stuff was used to blow up the government quarter in Oslo in the terrorist attack by Anders Brevik.
Presumably the ship tried to get to another port elsehwhere, but got into more mechanical trouble.
For this who don't know the place: the city is on an island, facing the mainland. There's a suburb on the mainland, connected to the city with a bridge and a tunnel. The ship anchored between the bridge and the tunnel.
"Over the weekend, MV Ruby was also denied access to the Strait of Denmark, the entrance to the Baltic which would have allowed it to offload its dangerous cargo at a Russian port.
According to Danish news reports, on Friday a pilot was to be allocated the following day, but when the time came, authorities appeared to have changed tack.
'The ship is not going to have a pilot tonight, and the latest I’ve heard is that it’s in Norwegian waters,' DanPilot press officer Anne Heinze told DR Nyheder over the weekend.
Instead, MV Ruby is apparently making its way toward the Channel, with Malta-flagged anchor handler Amber II maintaining a distance of around one kilometre...
Though the vessel was able to limp some 1,600km around the Norwegian coast, it now faces a fraught voyage through the Channel, past Spain and the Strait of Gibraltar and onward to Malta through two of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
And there are few good choices ahead for the vessel’s crew: should MV Ruby sink, the cargo will likely cause enormous environmental damage, including algal blooms which choke swathes of ocean life, and could lead to a shipping exclusion zone to contain the spread of pollution."
It is also effectively 'natural gas in solid form' - the main input to making ammonium nitrate is natural gas.The main cost is the cost of the natural gas, and there are huge worldwide markets for both natural gas and fertilizer. Therefore, from an economics perspective, natural gas and fertilizer are pretty much tied together.
Same as electricity and aluminium.
Natural gas is hard to ship - whereas fertilizer is easy to ship.
Since Russia has bountiful supplies of natural gas, and sanctions prevent it selling that gas to europe via pipeline, producing fertilizer and selling that to the rest of the world is a workaround.
* They state that natural gas is an input to the fertiliser product
* They state that with sanctions on natural gas from Russia, converting it to fertiliser evades the sanctions, albeit by transforming it into a different but saleable product.
>It is also effectively 'natural gas in solid form'
(Pure speculation of course, as I know nothing about the matter)
It's not really feasible to turn ammonium nitrate back to natural gas, moreso GP was insinuating it's a way to export (a proxy for) natural gas, eg to bypass sanctions.
It's easy to come up with explanations involving bad will. There must be some legit ones too. What are they trying to achieve? Did they buy some ammonium nitrate and are trying to offload it for a buyer, but successive ports are saying no? Surely whoever paid and loaded the cargo needed some idea of where and how they will offload it.
Perhaps due to poor weather conditions in the past 14 days, especially given it has a cracked hull.
Marine Traffic says it's under way to Malta.
Might have been a way of implying: whatever threats Ukraine may put on the Kerch bridge... well we obviously have means to retaliate "the west".
Or did it not?
I don't understand
Based on this it only applied for permit there:
https://www.maritimeoptima.com/maritime-news/troubled-ship-h...
Then the PM announced that "no".
https://www.maritimeoptima.com/maritime-news/potentially-exp...
See also "Ruby has previously been turned away by Norway, Sweden and Lithuania, as well as facing restrictions imposed by Denmark while crossing the Baltic Sea, because of her dangerous cargo." from this page:
https://www.maritimeoptima.com/maritime-news/on-the-road-aga...
And based on this (see "last port calls" section):
https://maritimeoptima.com/public/vessels/pages/imo:9626390/...
it went straight from Tromso to Tilbury
In my imagination there's this ship going from harbour to harbour only to be sent away. The thought of asking first never came into my mind.
What was intended with this shipment in the first place? who is responsible for it? Regarding current international sanction, what was this ship doing loading or unloading in Russia and then going to any cost in Europe.
Also, wouldn't it possible to unload it by smaller units with smaller boats why at the see?
> Maltese-registered cargo ship
This appears to be a deliberate attempt to cast doubt as to the "true" operator or entity controlling the vessel. The ship is "Maltese-registered" because it's owned by a Maltese company, 'Ruby Enterprise'. It's destination is Malta.
> Spurning the obvious solution of a return to Russia,
Is this obvious? As the article admits, the vessel is seaworthy. Why would a seaworthy ship carrying some exported product return to the origin port?
I think this BBC article[0] offers a much more balanced take on the events.
See many news articles e.g.
https://www.eureporter.co/world/malta/2023/08/09/malta-has-a...
https://www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/cypr...
That said, I do agree it's inflammatory and probably not the best source.
That may suggest bias, but also an unusual level of insight (and there is the possibility that it is an official position pushed through a "side channel" to make it look less official).
And according to the BBC article, it's destination isn't Malta, at least not until they figure out where else to unload the cargo, because Malta won't let them in with the cargo on board. That in itself is noteworthy. Especially since the "it might leak" claim sounds like it might just be an intentionally-transparent pretext.
Why would a seaworthy ship carrying some dangerous explosive material, that multiple ports have now refused entry, return to the origin port?
I mean at this point - is there in fact a port it can go to that is not the port of origin that will accept them?
It seems there isn't, so why travel around making moves towards other ports unless as a form of aggression. (no question mark)
Since this is one of the main (and historic) exports from Russia, I would imagine that one or two cargo ships have carried the stuff before.
A little more info on how it is stored/transported and under which eventualities the cargo would become bomb-like would give me a sense of journalistic satisfaction as an accompaniment to my sense of impending doom.
Here in Denmark the Danish coast guard also had to confront the ship.
The ship has enough Ammonium Nitrate to cause an explosion several times the size of the 2020 Beirut port explosion.
Basically any other country with a faulty ship full of dangerous explosive material would tow the ship back and fix their own mess.
Russia is instead using it as hybrid warfare against geopolitical adversaries.
In the case of Arctic Norway, there are plenty of unpopulated, sheltered fjords. No need to dock it in a commercial port in an urban area.
…only if it hasn’t been deliberately sabotaged. It’s had opportunities to return to Russian ports and just sailed right by them.
Why is it desperate to dock in a Western port?
There must be some sort of remote outport where it can dock without the fear of obliterating critical infrastructure.
Chances are it docks, it gets abandoned because there’s no money to fix it, and it stays conveniently parked until an “unfortunate” fire happens.
Plausible deniability is the modus operandi of Russian operations. Borderline Personality Disorder-style scorched earth retaliation is more so.
I would be less inclined to believe if such strategies weren't as commonly employed. But, they are.
This tends to not make international news as this activity isn't exceptional. It just varies in intensity and scope over time.
There's a difference between a lack of imagination and a lack of credulity for any breathless headline.
Have you paid any attention to Russia's meatwave tactics in Ukraine that so far already piled up half a million of Russian casualties?
If you did, you wouldn't be considering this scenario implausible, because we see videos of said Russians needlessly marching towards their deaths on a daily basis.
I'm not saying it not possible, but the fact that there isn't a rather more concerted response involving, say, the SBS or an encounter with an Astute within the last several weeks while it's been tooling around the North Sea implies that the intelligence services don't consider it as much of an actual active threat as the media circus wants it to be.
Certainly if there was even a breath of Russian military on the ship, I don't think "hey sure, just drop anchor outside Margate and chill next to these other ships and right by the Thames and Channel shipping lanes" would be the call they'd make.
The people Russia is sending to their deaths in their meat wave tactics aren't exactly Russian military either. They are at best civilians under contract and moved to front lines weeks if not days after being hired.
Then there are the civilians pressed into service such as unsuspecting immigrants and Ukrainians who found themselves in occupied territories.
The key factor is complete disrespect for those under your control, and willingness to sacrifice themselves for the smallest reason.
Margate may not be luxurious, but it's not a Ukrainian front line.
The only evidence that it's anything other than a damaged ship in a shit situation (even shitter than your average Syrian/UAE cargo ship, which is probably saying something) with a very low chance of a very big explosion, trying to find somewhere to put in, is that the word "megabomb" makes good headlines and people want to have exciting things happen, even if "it" is blowing up a town, no matter how dreary, from 12 miles away with what would presumably be the biggest non-nuclear explosion in history.
https://www.ft.com/content/b9396112-585a-4f7e-9628-13d500c99...
I'd far rather be crew on this ship than on HMS Campbeltown.
If you are going to dismiss it: dismiss it with facts and arguments. Don't just lazily downvote it.
As for you accusing me of posting flame-bait: that's not very nice. I presume you have some way of proving your speculation?
Grandparent, not you. I'm not speculating about anything, please re-read my comment.
I can imagine this being a simple ruse to annoy NATO countries and their navies too, that wouldn't be out if character, but beyond that... That would be a very petty hybrid risk.
Or maybe Russia is just trying lots of things just to see what sticks..?
From my side, while I think using a semi damaged ship as a hybrid threat would be within the Russian MO, it also seems like an easy one to protect against.
Note that for the ship to travel between Lithuania and Norway/UK, it needs to pass by Kaliningrad. For some reason the ship didn't stop there.
The ship also didn't went from Lithuania to st Petersburg. Why was that?
Back to my question: can all these justifiably concerned countries not simply refuse access for this ship, end of story?
Pretty much. Entire crews can be (and are) abandoned in international waters for years at a time if the company decides they don't want to deal with the ship any more.
Which makes some sense as to why the crew would bring the ship down to the North Sea from the far northern Norwegian coast (weather this week: down to 2 degrees C, wind up to 40mph). If you think you might be abandoned in late September, and ports in Murmansk and Arkangelsk could also decide not to admit you, do you want to overwinter at sea in the Arctic, or go literally anywhere else? And that's if the company does forsake them, which is also a hypothetical. More likely, the company also would probably rather the ship is not at risk of being disabled in the Arctic considering they presumably couldn't get a guarantee readmittance to the port of origin and decided to at least get to relative safety down south with better weather and near countries that at least plausibly would lift a finger if the ship really was at risk.
Obviously, the ship shouldn't be used in such a way, but I would save the war-like language for a situation where it tries to ram its way into a port against the coastal guard commands.
That too, see the Beirut port explosion incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion
Going by the article, the ship carries an order of magnitude more ammonium nitrate then the amount that detonated in Beirut
Simple to become a powerful explosive
If Russia wants to nuke an European port city without using an actual nuke and while being able to at least leave some doubt whether it may have just been an accident, this certainly looks like a plausible way.
I guess the key is that after a few days in Tromsø, the authorities still didn't know what kind of repair was needed, and called bullshit.
I agree. In fact the premise of the article - that this should be treated as a threat from Russia - hangs on the understanding that there is a legitimate reason a European port would accept a ship carrying this cargo. So how many such shipments are regularly made from Russia to Europe? What ports are designated to accept them? What safety measures do they have to handle the cargo? In what way is this particular ship different from those legitimate ones? Without this information, the article is incomplete.
If there are no such legitimate shipments the article cannot claim there is any ambiguity about the threat posed by this ship.
https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:16...
The ammonium nitrate cargo alone is worth several million us dollar.
...
A third of EU imports of urea, the cheapest form of nitrogen-based fertiliser, come from Russia, with the amount imported in 2023 close to record levels, Eurostat data shows. Poland’s imports of Russian urea climbed to almost $120mn in 2023, up from just over $84mn in 2021, for example, according to customs data.
...
Other big players are leaving the market. BASF, the world’s largest chemicals group, has shrunk its operations in Europe over the past few years, including its fertiliser business, and instead focused new investments in the US and China, where costs are lower." [0]
[0] https://archive.is/20240630042149/https://www.ft.com/content...
> It is then expected to continue through the Channel with its destination listed as Marsaxlokk in Malta. The authorities in Malta said that they would only accept the vessel if it got rid of its cargo beforehand.
See this article from German newspaper ZEIT (auto-translated using Google Translate): https://www-zeit-de.translate.goog/2024/41/russische-sabotag...
> The disposable agents
> Russia is waging a war of sabotage against the West. Initially with graffiti, now with arson attacks. The perpetrators are young men who have no idea who they are serving.
Original German-language article at https://www.zeit.de/2024/41/russische-sabotage-wegwerf-agent...
Archived at https://archive.ph/20240926105720/https://www.zeit.de/2024/4...
It’s quite similar to a trojan horse.
Anyone have a Marine Traffic account and can tell us about its movements?
Kandalaksha
Tromsø
Klaipeda
Gothenburg
[1] https://theloadstar.com/baltic-ports-bar-damaged-ruby-now-in...
Now that I think about it, while it could be hard to sell that much fertilizer from a port where it wasn't ordered to, transfering it to another vessel not in need of repairs would solve the whole situation overnight wouldn't it? That's expensive but should be normal procedure I'd expect. So yeah what are the operators up to?
If the cargo is Russian and you legitimately want to dock for repairs, then why try Tromsø, Klaipėda, and then anchor the ship off the UK coast?
If you legitimately need to dock for repairs why not dock at Kaliningrad? The cargo is after all Russian so let them deal with the problem.
You have to literally sail past Kaliningrad to get to the English channel in any case, so it's hardly surprising that people port authorities are cautious if not outright suspicious.
The implication is that the ship didn't want to go back to Murmansk. Possibly it was also denied entry, or doesn't want to get stuck there over winter if the Russians can't or won't repair the ship. It's not a Russian ship, it might not even be Russian-owned cargo any more, depending on the INCOTERMS, why would they make the effort if no one else will?
https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2358770/ship-with-r...
Diplomatically one can say “yes you can dock here and unload cargo, but we demand that it be off shore and away from otherwise sensitive infrastructure”
This would allow such cargo to be offloaded safely in desperate circumstances while still maintaining the integrity of key infrastructure.
Blow it up? its ALREADY close enough to cause significant damage.
Somehow sink it without detonating it? The environmental damage alone would be devistating to the econcomy...
if this is a russian plot, it's already increadibly successfull.
So a possible solution would indeed be stopping it by any means necessary somewhere between the 22 km mark (where it enters territorial waters) and the 3 km mark where it becomes a serious hazard.
The only environmental damage would be from the ship fuel. The fertilizer is not a problem, maybe it would cause a short term algae boom.
London actually.
This can all be done at sea. Of course, someone has to pay.
Since what happened in Beirut, how do we allow to have so much explosive on a single ship?
Is that true? It seems, from a pedestrian perspective, if just fire could trigger it, they wouldn’t be transporting it in such amounts.
Ah interesting. Yeah trusting Russian inspectors that they did their job is not a good idea.
"In the second case, the explosion results from a fire that spreads into the ammonium nitrate (AN) itself (Texas City, Brest, Tianjin, Beirut) or to a mixture of an ammonium nitrate with a combustible material during the fire. The fire must be confined at least to a degree for successful transition from a fire to an explosion (a phenomenon known as "deflagration to detonation transition", or DDT). Pure, compact AN is stable and very difficult to initiate. Ammonium nitrate decomposes in temperatures above 169 °C (336 °F). Pure AN is stable and will stop decomposing once the heat source is removed, but when catalysts are present, the reaction can become self-sustaining (known as self-sustaining decomposition, or SSD). This is a well-known hazard with some types of NPK fertilizers and is responsible for the loss of several cargo ships."
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ammonium_nitrate_inc...
You'd think so, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosion
A classic example of how reasoning from logic alone is no match actual knowledge of reality.
Or perhaps, in this specific case, the unsafeness is the point: it's intended to harass.
One early industrial disaster and the biggest explosion of it's time happened because the workers in a production plant in Germany regularly used Dynamite to clear out stuck ammonium nitrate in silos. The last time they tried, the plant was obliterated together with most of the nearby town.
> Indeed, nothing extraordinary had happened during an estimated 20,000 firings, until the fateful explosion on September 21 [1921].
It would be trivial for an inspector to go look and see if such mixing has occurred... and if it has not, let it into port to sell the cargo.
Only happens spontaneously at high temperature/pressure. But of course being an explosive reaction, once it starts in a little pocket of material, all the neighboring material experiences a lot of heat and pressure, and blows up. And then the next layer, and the next layer, etc.
If improperly stored, pockets form with different pH values that cause it to spontaneously occur at lower temperatures. Or a spark, or a compressive event in an unstable patch, etc.
As far as I know, the explosion that leveled part of Beirut was mostly assumed to be caused by uncontaminated AN too.
But you do not need to mix fuel with the fertilizer to activate it. It provides its own fuel.
Looking in Wikipedia, in the danger warning square, in the yellow part potasium nitrare has a 0 and ammonium nitrate has a 3.
Don't try this at home ...
Potasium nitrate has a lot of oxygens but nothing to burn with it. So it's only explosive when mixed with some fuel.
Ammonium nitrate has the oxygen and also the hidrogens that can be combined and release energy. It has also some spare oxygen, it is probably more dangerous mixed with fuel.
I still wouldn't want to be near a fertiliser ship though so it'd be reasonable to tell it to go somewhere else.
If a ship explodes, Putin will deny everything, and grudgingly everyone will accept it, because you can't be certain, and we don't want war. But if a long-range bomber leaves Russia, flies to Liverpool and drops a bomb, it's an open declaration of war.
Dropping a nuke on it is equally or more damaging, but likewise highly identifiable and attributable, and would force an even bigger reaction, likely even by China. Also, again, might be shot down.
An explosion of a cargo ship is just as damaging as a small nuke, but cannot be immediately identified as an attack - even if people suspect it, it's hard to conclusively prove that it wasn't an accident. This makes it hard to muster a unified and strong response.
Submariners would like a word.
CEPA is a propaganda site:
https://cepa.org/article/wake-up-nato-its-sabotage/
"European energy security and the continent’s critical infrastructure are the core pillars of Transatlantic security. Safeguarding them is fundamental to ensuring democratic resilience and stability."
In light of Nordstream, this is hypocritical and offensive to Western Europeans who suffer the economic consequences.
Yes, the Russian invasion is bad, yes, they should get out of Ukraine, but repeatedly manufacturing additional stories is counterproductive.
The GPS jamming is classified by the Finnish transport agency as a "side effect of Russia's anti-drone activities":
https://www.politico.eu/article/gps-jamming-is-a-side-effect...
"Jamming GPS signals over the Baltic Sea is “most likely” a side effect of Russia's anti-drone activities, Traficom, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency, said today.
“The interference intensified when Ukraine's drone attacks on Russia's energy infrastructure began in January 2024,” Traficom said in a press release.
Estonia also blames Russia for the signal jamming, but the Finnish agency doesn't agree with the Tallinn government in defining the interference as a hybrid attack."