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Comment by dtquad | Hacker News Reader

No, Russia is deliberately using this ship to harass NATO countries. The ship was recently unusually close to a NATO base in Norway before the Norwegian coast guard chased them away.

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.

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This is quite possible, equally though, what is stopping all these countries from simply refusing access to territorial waters for this ship. It seems to be travelling for thousands of miles just fine, so can't claim emergency shelter, and even then the danger to third parties seems to justify any refusals. The crew is likely tiny and easy to rescue if need be.

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.

> This is quite possible, equally though, what is stopping all these countries from simply refusing access to territorial waters for this ship.

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?

I get that, and it is odd. Though Russia can also wash its hands off of that ship. IIRC it is Maltese-flagged, owned by a Maltese company, and the crew is international. It "just so happens" that it contracts for Russian cargos. Russia may perhaps (?) be the ultimate beneficiary but it's also not strictly speaking Russian.

Back to my question: can all these justifiably concerned countries not simply refuse access for this ship, end of story?

> 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.

The ship started in Murmansk. How would it have gotten to Lithuania (or Kaliningrad, St Petersburg or anywhere in the Baltic) if it's not allowed though the passage by Denmark?

I'm not sure if this can be described as "warfare"- hybrid or not. You'd need to call the migrants boats that "harass" Italian ports a tool of war, too. Maybe that's warranted, but to me, it sounds like an unnecessary escalation.

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.

For those who downvote the above, yes it presents speculation as if verified fact, but what it puts forth is actually plausible when you see how Russian military efforts tend to make use of uncertainty.

If you are going to dismiss it: dismiss it with facts and arguments. Don't just lazily downvote it.

Just to be clear, you want HN users put effort into a rebuttal of the factless speculation presented as a fact? This isn't how discussions work, this is flamebait (just like the article itself) and has no place on HN. This doesn't contribute to the discussion, and should be downvoted and flagged.

The two last statements of the post are indeed speculation. What was said up until that point can be verified. However, the speculation should be seen in light of recent history. Russia does have a history of shady maritime dealings covered by deniability. For instance you have probably heard of cables that have been mysteriously cut in the northern regions.

As for you accusing me of posting flame-bait: that's not very nice. I presume you have some way of proving your speculation?

>As for you accusing me of posting flame-bait

Grandparent, not you. I'm not speculating about anything, please re-read my comment.

You don’t know that, this is pure speculation.

Seems pretty accurate, no ? The ammonium nitrate stored in Beirut was 2,750 tonnes, this ships is carrying about 20,000 tonnes

It's not the same. Storage conditions matter.

That is true, but given the current level of trust between Russian and 'Western' authorities, would it not be prudent to assume the vessel is indeed a threat and keep it away from infrastructure and the general population if at all possible?

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.

> Storage conditions matter.

…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?

I don’t know but it’s easy to imagine why an international crew would chose to be stranded in the west instead of Russia.

Didn’t they try to dock in two infrastructure-critical ports with a damaged vessel? How about the order of the docking?

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.

They've been wandering close to the Danish and Swedish coasts not that long ago with "research ships" that had armed personnel on board.

I would be less inclined to believe if such strategies weren't as commonly employed. But, they are.

This is a relatively constant factor along the Norwegian coast and has been for many years. In recent years the behavior has become a bit more aggressive with communication cables at sea going missing.

This tends to not make international news as this activity isn't exceptional. It just varies in intensity and scope over time.

If this were a threat, how would the Russians coerce a ship full of sailors to not surrender or abandon the ship rather than choose between vaporisation or arrest or death by navy when trying to escape the aftermath (assuming they even have boats that can get away from the blast)?

What if Russia cut the normal radio with a crew of dispensable third-worlders dummies like you suffer from a DEFICIT OF IMAGINATION

How would they have been turned away from ports, or even hope to get into a port, without a working radio (but still a working AIS)?

There's a difference between a lack of imagination and a lack of credulity for any breathless headline.

Maybe they don't know they are used.

> (...) how would the Russians coerce a ship full of sailors to not surrender or abandon the ship rather than choose between vaporisation or arrest or death by (...)

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.

Are the sailors actually Russian military? Or are there suicidal commissars on board along with them to put a gun in their backs 1000km from home?

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.

> Are the sailors actually Russian military?

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.

Kind of seems like climbing onto or sending a message to the anchor hoy currently alongside and requesting asylum from the murderous Russians would be the obvious way out of that one.

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.

“The [Ukrainian] commanders estimated that 50 to 70 per cent of new infantry troops were killed or wounded within days of starting their first rotation.“

https://www.ft.com/content/b9396112-585a-4f7e-9628-13d500c99...

http://archive.today/WKqxz

The same way Russia coerces soldiers to go into the meat grinder against Ukraine - money, assurances their families will be cared after (well it might be with a sack of potatoes, but the poor fools can't know that).

Do not underestimate the importance of drugs cocktails in the meat wave tactics employed by Russia. Also the running Buryat and other ethnic-minorities from the east of the empire aren't told that IR scopes can see through smoke-grenade clouds, and seem not to be told that the trenches in front are not full of friendlies.

If the plan was to deliberately detonate the ship rather than just be an annoyance that can't be ignored, then it seems like a very obvious option to rig it with a timer and have the crew escape during the night. Risk of arrest for sure but they'd have a chance, and the west has shown no shortage of willingness in the past to exchange assassins for hostages. People take on worse missions all the time.

I'd far rather be crew on this ship than on HMS Campbeltown.

And if that were remotely on the cards, even within a shadow if a doubt, there'd be an exclusion zone around the ship. And there isn't. There are ships going right past it, right now.

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