Half a Story Is Better Than None

 

1. Russian Navy can get one of it’s ships from the Black Sea all the way across the Mediterranean to the Atlantic in just a couple of days. Speedy!

   Not buying that story. My battle-group did go from the Israeli coast to Gibraltar in three days. At flank speed, and most of our ships were either nuclear or gas-turbine. That was back in 1986. I doubt the Russians have either types of ships in good enough condition to repeat our performance.

   What slowed us down was a nasty storm off of Sicily. Otherwise, we could have made it in two days.

   Nasty storm. Only time I got ‘seasick’ and lost my dinner while on-watch.

   Posted by Christopher       08/14/2009  at  06:04 PM  



2. I must (for once) agree with Christopher. Something isn’t right here. I can’t say what it is, but this entire situation stinks.

   The fact that the ship is Finnish and Maltese (albeit Russian-Manned) doesn’t lower my suspicions much. The former has been a bitter rival to Russian power in the Baltic during the past century, and Malta has long been a target of Moscow’s intelligence, in large part because- since the Napoleonic Russian occupation of Corfu and the surrounding islands in the Adriatic- Russia has long had an interest in acquiring some localized Island base in the Mediterranean. And Malta’s spectacular endurance in WWII is sure to have only drawn more interest.

   In addition, Russia has long been interested in the Iberian ports and Cape Verde for the possibility of their naval power into the Central and Southern Atlantic. For the later, distance and Portugal’s membership in NATO precluded any such move, but since Cape Verde became independent, the threat of it becoming a Russian naval base has now re-emerged.

   If Christopher is correct and the Russians shouldn’t have any surface ship capable of traveling this fast, we have two possibilities;

   A. The Russians have some secret, fast-moving warship that we don’t know about, which would be bad, or

   B. The Russians somehow knew that this would happen and thus dispatched forces BEFORE they said so, which (if anything) may well be worse.

   Another odd thing I must say is why would they refuse to disclose the status of the crew? Certainly, you might need to debrief them beforehand and the like, but why not even a cursory “we found them, and they are well/dead/walking on stumps?” That strikes me as exceedingly odd. Who was the first to board, the Cape Verdeans or the Russians?

   Another troubling fact is that the identity of the attackers on Gotland seems to remain a mystery. You almost certainly wouldn’t get Somalis that far North, and the Chechens are unlikely to have some insane supporters on a boat attacking Russian shipping in the Baltic. So, who did it? And even if we can’t know WHO did it, do we know anything about them? How did they communicate with the Crew? Did they speak with an accent? What ethnicity were they (or even color?)? What were they armed with? Did they claim to support any cause? It seems almost as though they came on board the ship from nowhere and then fell off the face of the Earth. I doubt they are still on the ship if for no other reason than this would probably have blown up into some kind of firefight with the arrival of the authorities, so where did they go? And why would somebody attack the ship twice? Are we looking at three factions at work here?

   And, finally, we have to consider how this ties in to other suspicious maritime activity involving the Russians. While this is almost certainly different from the whole Russo-Somali-Ukrainian crisis before (see my prior rant on that), and I doubt the causes are directly linked, this should raise some red flags.

   And why is NATO not involved in the search? The North Atlantic IS their primary maritime domain, and they have prided themselves for their efficient record against piracy here before.

   This is ominous to say the least. Who were the attackers? What did they want? What is going on with NATO? What do the Russians want here?

   This is… ominous, to say the least. We know so little about the situation and are so dependent on Russian sources (and we know how Russian sources can be, see the German army’s Russian-made maps of Russia before WWII), and this is hardly reassuring. I think it is one of the “just below the surface” events of the intelligence community- something that the world knows vaguely about but is tied to the murky world of clock and dagger. I don’t know what is going on, but I am willing to wager it is something sinister.

   Chris may be able to better fill in the technical details than I, but I still feel a chill…

   Posted by Turtler       08/16/2009  at  04:35 AM  

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