Secret tanker tricks exposed in Baltic Sea navigation mystery
Finnish authorities spot strange patterns in ships navigation systems near Russian waters. Coast Guard finds vessels using tech tricks to hide their real locations while Baltic Sea faces GPS problems
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
