Russia is spying on Sweden and the Nordic and Baltic countries have an emergency meeting in Gotland

Swedish Navy detected communications equipment on Russian tankers that is not needed on ships of this type

There is a Russian shadow fleet spying in the Baltic Sea, especially in Sweden – the newest member of NATO. The alert is given by the Swedish Navy, which detected the intruders in its waters with equipment on board that is not necessary on the ships in question, allegedly oil or fishing tankers.

“We are finding antennas and masts that do not normally belong to, for example, fishing vessels, so it is clear that there are other objectives associated with their activities in terms of movement at sea,” said Swedish Navy Chief Ewa Skoog Haslum, to local media.

Russian ships operating outside national maritime space are nothing new, even less so when sailing through the Baltic Sea, especially since the start of the war with Ukraine. It is estimated that Russia has 1,400 of these tankers around the world, which sail outside the 12 nautical mile limit that delimits a country’s territorial waters. Now the tankers have been detected off the eastern coast of the Swedish island Gotland, threatening Sweden, which is NATO’s newest member state.

For the Swedish Navy, the fleet appears to be a spy fleet, as they are equipped with communications that are not required for this type of ship.

“We feel that there are additional objectives in their activities”, admitted Admiral Skoog Haslum, who speaks of “hybrid operations”.

Alongside the threat to Swedish security, there is the danger of an environmental disaster. Shadow ships are typically used by Russia to make dangerous ship-to-ship transfers of oil. This is the way found by Moscow to circumvent the economic sanctions imposed by the West, which banned “the acquisition, import or transfer of crude oil transported by sea and certain petroleum products from Russia to the European Union”.

The environmental threat scenario is aggravated by the conditions of oil tankers. They are fragile and aged, are in poor condition and are not insured. Furthermore, these shadow ships frequently change their flag registration.

The matter is now worrying the Swedish Government, which has been putting pressure on the European Commission to include measures against ships in its next round of sanctions. “We will all be affected if there is a serious problem resulting from a collision or an oil leak from one of these ships, which are also, in many cases, unseaworthy, or very close to being unseaworthy.” , he warned, quoted by the Guardian, this month.

Meanwhile, the foreign ministers of the eight countries of the Nordic-Baltic group met in Gotland earlier this month to discuss how to combat the Russian fleet.

This is not the first time that the Kremlin has illegally used civilian vessels for spying purposes. Russian tankers have been in Norwegian waters for years.