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Comment by qwery | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about CEPA (this is the first time I've come across them) but I don't think they're the best source for news. This article is extremely inflammatory, frames the entire story around Russia and seems to be extremely selective with which details were included. The article is stuffed with problems but I'll point out just a couple of examples:

> 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.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62g95721leo

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This is pretty much a non-point. In the age of off-shore, ownership-obfuscated, tax avoiding company proliferation, any country "owning" a vessel means very little. To give an example, technically most "mining" companies in the world are Canadian. What that means in practice is they rent a desk in one of a handful of office towers in Vancouver to set their legal/financial headquarters in the country to access services and the TSX. They are certainly not "Canadian" in the true sense. I see news articles sometimes mentioning X Canadian mining company operating in South America, Africa, or SE Asia. If the true owners are not Canadian, the operations are not Canadian, the office workers, leadership team, and financial flows never touch Canada, it's not Canadian.

That said, I do agree it's inflammatory and probably not the best source.

If Malta choses to give a ship a flag, they should bear some level of consequence for that action.

The article contains an interesting note at the end: "Eitvydas Bajarūnas is an ambassador in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania, and currently a Center for Europe Policy Analysis (CEPA) Visiting Fellow. Assessments and views expressed in the article are those of the author and should not be treated as the official position of the MFA of the Republic of Lithuania."

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.

Astonishing amount of critical thinkers here in this thread who have to highlight that the ship is Maltese because it's flying a Maltese flag as if this matters in international shipping.

> Why would a seaworthy ship carrying some exported product return to the origin port?

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)

Yeah, cause Russians couldn't afford a front in Malta of all places, or play the crew blind.

A Russian front in a small corruptible EU state in the Mediterranean (e.g. Malta, Cyprus) would not be a surprise at all.

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 is exactly my point.

Sure. I thought though that it might need spelling out to some of the audience here who are far removed from that part of the world. I myself didn't know it until I visited Malta and Cyprus.

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