The Finnish Coast Guard spots weird stuff going on with ships nav-systems since spring-2024. Ships sailing in the baltic-sea keep losing their way due to messed-up satellite signals
Last week Lulu Ranne Finlands interior-minister pointed at Russia as the trouble-maker for these GPS problems. The coast guard says ships got into some tight spots – almost hitting islands n shallow waters (they had to jump in and help those lost vessels)
The nav-problems got more complex lately with a new twist: some oil-tankers are playing hide-n-seek with their location data. Pekka Niittyla from Gulf of Finland Coast Guard says they caught about 10 different tankers doing this near St Petersburg; its probably linked to hiding Russian oil trades
Based on our assessment this is tied to dodging sanctions or their results
The whole mess includes:
- Ships location systems going offline on purpose
- Fake positions showing up in tracking systems
- Navigation equipment acting weird
- Vessels getting lost at sea
Russians might be messing with signals to keep their oil ports safe from Ukrainian attacks; though they say they dont do any of this stuff. The coast-guard keeps seeing more n more of these tricks – making their job harder everyday