“Russia’s controversial intelligence ship Yantar has been operating in the Caribbean, or mid-Atlantic, since October,” writes defense analyst H I Sutton this week in Forbes.
He adds that the ship “is suspected by Western navies of being involved in operations on undersea communications cables.”
Significantly, she appears to be avoiding broadcasting her position via AIS (Automated Identification System). I suspect that going dark on AIS is a deliberate measure to frustrate efforts to analyse her mission. She has briefly used AIS while making port calls, where it would be expected by local authorities, for example while calling at Trinidad on November 8 and again on November 28. However in both cases she disappeared from AIS tracking sites almost as soon as she left port…
Yantar has been observed conducting search patterns in the vicinity of internet cables, and there is circumstantial evidence that she has been responsible for internet outages, for example off the Syrian coast in 2016.
Yantar is “allegedly an ‘oceanographic research vessel’,” notes Popular Mechanics, in a mid-November article headlined “Why is Russia’s spy ship near American waters?”
A study by British think tank Policy Exchange mentioned that the ship carried two submersibles capable of tapping undersea cables for information — or outright cutting them, the Forbes article points out. “Whether Yantar’s presence involves undersea cables, or some other target of interest to the Russians, it will be of particular interest to U.S. forces.”
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot