This is good enough for another Bizarre Friday. While everyone is caught up in the Somalian piracy story, few have taken notice of our local, home-brewed maritime chaos around the Maltese-flagged but Russian-crewed cargo vessel M/V Arctic Sea. The Arctic Sea set out from Jakobstad, Finland, on 23 July with a stated cargo of wood, and headed towards the Algerian pot of Bejaia - until Stuff Happened.
On 24 July, they were approached by what looked like a Swedish police RIB near Gotland. A boarding party of around ten people, said to have spoken English, came aboard, detained the crew, ran through the ship with what has been described as a fine-toothed comb. Then, the crew reported that they left the boat. Sweden denies involvement.
On 28 July, the boat passed through the Strait of Dover, and two days later, its AIS transmitter (giving location and identity signals) was switched off. From that point on, the ship was, for all practical purposes, lost. On August 3, Interpol issued a hijack alert.
At this point, it gets rightly weird. On August 14, the Arctic Sea was sighted off Cape Verde, and a flurry of weird statements started. First, the Cape Verde Russian ambassador said that a frigate was heading there (detached from the Black Sea Fleet, which has been told to look for the Acrtic Sea), and some other military person who didn’t really want to have his name on record said that the ship is found, but we’re not telling you where it is, ha-ha. On August 17, finally, the Russians publicly announced that they found the Arctic Sea, that they’ve been systematically misleading all and sundry to preserve OPSEC (yup, with the Russians, that’s actually rather credible) and the crew have been picked up by the Ladny, a Krivak class frigate of the Russian Navy for a friendly debrief. Or whatever.
The usual explain-o-matics ensued, the Finns and the Swedish Police initiated a joint whatever, the chief security officer of the Renaissance, the insurance company that insured the Arctic Sea, reported there have been demands for around €1.5m (not that much, considering that the cargo was worth marginally more), the Malta Maritime Authority suggested that they knew along with the Finnish and Swedish maritime security authorities where the ship was all along, and finally on 18 August, the Russians announced that they’ve got eight suspects in the local nick. The alleged hijackers denied they wanted the ship, and claim to be environmentalists. More bizarre details: the Russians claim that when the boat was found, the captain said the ship was in fact North Korean (and he sought to pull that off… how? Did he have a spare N Korean flag in his pocket and a bucket of paint to change Valetta to Pyongyang?), which of course the North Koreans denied immediately. Meanwhile, the Russians dished out gag orders on the crew.
Well, on Wednesday, it just got a bit weirder when Mikhail Voitenko, editor of the Sovfrakht Marine Bulletin decided he was better off jumping ship (ha, ha) and leaving Russia for a bit:
“Some serious guys hinted to me yesterday or the day before yesterday,” Voitenko said. “They advised me to return in three or four months.”
Asked who the people were, Voitenko said simply, “Guess.”
Asked if it was because of his role in the Arctic Sea case, Voitenko said, “Yes, it was because of the Arctic Sea.”
Speculation is now rife, with the EU’s piracy czar (jeez this post is full of bad puns today!), former Estonian defence chief Admiral Tarmo Kouts saying that the Russian story is not very credible, and the ship probably carried missiles. To whom remains a big beautiful question. Algeria isn’t a bad guess, but the shady bunch of guys in the hills over there calling themselves al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb sounds better.
Nice, eh?
