Floating megabomb heaves to near the English coast

> While Lithuanian authorities announced there was no evidence of malicious intent against the country’s national security, they noted that when dealing with Russia, or other unfriendly international actors, states should always be cautious.

This bears repeating. Russia has bee actively engaged in low-intensity warfare with the west for decades, and has single-handledly escalated their aggression towards the west in general but western Europe in particular for the last couple of years to the point they overtly and very publicly threaten the world with all sorts of attacks and global annihilation.

Once Russia tries to casually float a massive bomb right into your doorstep, only a massive moron would not mitigate the risk presented by Russia, even if considered implausible.

> Spurning the obvious solution of a return to Russia, where she loaded at Kandalaksha in late August, the damaged vessel embarked on an odyssey of attempted entry to European ports, beginning at the Norwegian anchorage of Tromsø

This needs more explanation, does this mean the captain refused? Or Russian port authorities refused? Or they just... chose to limp in a particular direction?

From another article [0]:

> Not long after leaving the Russian port of Kandalaksha in late August, the general cargo vessel ran aground in a storm in Norwegian waters and a Port State inspection in Norway confirmed cracks in the hull and damage to the ship’s propeller and rudder.

[0] https://theloadstar.com/baltic-ports-bar-damaged-ruby-now-in...

Notably, ammonium nitrate is fertilizer.

It is also effectively 'natural gas in solid form' - the main input to making ammonium nitrate is natural gas.The main cost is the cost of the natural gas, and there are huge worldwide markets for both natural gas and fertilizer. Therefore, from an economics perspective, natural gas and fertilizer are pretty much tied together.

Same as electricity and aluminium.

Natural gas is hard to ship - whereas fertilizer is easy to ship.

Since Russia has bountiful supplies of natural gas, and sanctions prevent it selling that gas to europe via pipeline, producing fertilizer and selling that to the rest of the world is a workaround.

I don't entirely follow the logic of the trip (but I know nothing about shipping). Tromso on the Norwegian Sea, then Klaipeda on the Baltic, now off the shore of Kent? That's very roundabout.

It's easy to come up with explanations involving bad will. There must be some legit ones too. What are they trying to achieve? Did they buy some ammonium nitrate and are trying to offload it for a buyer, but successive ports are saying no? Surely whoever paid and loaded the cargo needed some idea of where and how they will offload it.

I don't know much about CEPA (this is the first time I've come across them) but I don't think they're the best source for news. This article is extremely inflammatory, frames the entire story around Russia and seems to be extremely selective with which details were included. The article is stuffed with problems but I'll point out just a couple of examples:

> Maltese-registered cargo ship

This appears to be a deliberate attempt to cast doubt as to the "true" operator or entity controlling the vessel. The ship is "Maltese-registered" because it's owned by a Maltese company, 'Ruby Enterprise'. It's destination is Malta.

> Spurning the obvious solution of a return to Russia,

Is this obvious? As the article admits, the vessel is seaworthy. Why would a seaworthy ship carrying some exported product return to the origin port?

I think this BBC article[0] offers a much more balanced take on the events.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62g95721leo

I love the word 'megabomb' as much as the next guy, and I'm about all threat escalation, but isn't ammonium nitrate also fertiliser?

Since this is one of the main (and historic) exports from Russia, I would imagine that one or two cargo ships have carried the stuff before.

A little more info on how it is stored/transported and under which eventualities the cargo would become bomb-like would give me a sense of journalistic satisfaction as an accompaniment to my sense of impending doom.

Here’s its current location:

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:16...

Ships and their crews can‘t be cheap. Who paid to put the ammonium nirate on the ruby? Who paid for the ship to go somewhere? What was the original deal involving the ammonium nitrate? Did someone in another country originally plan to buy it but the deal was later cancelled?

The ammonium nitrate cargo alone is worth several million us dollar.

Combine that story with the recent, substantial reports about hapless pseudo-mercenary "disposable agents" bought by Russian intelligence, and the whole thing feels even more icky. Have that ship dock somewhere, and some idiot assets who don't know what they got themselves into infiltrate it to start a fire or something, for a few hundred bucks.

See this article from German newspaper ZEIT (auto-translated using Google Translate): https://www-zeit-de.translate.goog/2024/41/russische-sabotag...

> The disposable agents

> Russia is waging a war of sabotage against the West. Initially with graffiti, now with arson attacks. The perpetrators are young men who have no idea who they are serving.

Original German-language article at https://www.zeit.de/2024/41/russische-sabotage-wegwerf-agent...

Archived at https://archive.ph/20240926105720/https://www.zeit.de/2024/4...

The great sort of news you want to hear while drinking your morning coffee and living in Kent to the east of London.

Is it unfeasible to ship these kinds of things in smaller loads? Why would you put any kind of dangerous material that would "obliterate the center of any port city" in the same place without strong guarantees that nothing will go wrong? A boat does not seem like that kind of place.

Just leave it offshore then? I’m fairly certain ‘outside of territorial waters’ is equivalent to ‘more than 25km from shore’. It can safely explode there. If the crew want to get taken off their sinking ship they are more than welcome.

For the non-boaters, “heaves to” means “has stopped” in this context.

I'm assuming this is the ship? https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:16...

Anyone have a Marine Traffic account and can tell us about its movements?

Russia sent a tugboat to Cuba. They can easily rescue the ship if they wanted.

One thing that's only lightly touched upon in the article: Is this journey unusual and where is the fertilizer usually unloaded? The way the article is written, the ship's operators may with plausible deniability be deliberately targeting ports where a blast would be most debilitating for NATO. But where are other ships with this fertilizer unloading? It must be a common operation in European ports. Are there special ports for this, and the captain is spurning them? Ostensibly because they want to dock for repairs?

Now that I think about it, while it could be hard to sell that much fertilizer from a port where it wasn't ordered to, transfering it to another vessel not in need of repairs would solve the whole situation overnight wouldn't it? That's expensive but should be normal procedure I'd expect. So yeah what are the operators up to?

Sorry, but this stinks to high heaven, and what it stinks of is bullshit.

If the cargo is Russian and you legitimately want to dock for repairs, then why try Tromsø, Klaipėda, and then anchor the ship off the UK coast?

If you legitimately need to dock for repairs why not dock at Kaliningrad? The cargo is after all Russian so let them deal with the problem.

You have to literally sail past Kaliningrad to get to the English channel in any case, so it's hardly surprising that people port authorities are cautious if not outright suspicious.

This is how I found out that Russia is burning down IKEA warehouses in Europe xD

Is there something to be said for “consumable” deep water off shore ports for contents that are “sensitive” like this?

Diplomatically one can say “yes you can dock here and unload cargo, but we demand that it be off shore and away from otherwise sensitive infrastructure”

This would allow such cargo to be offloaded safely in desperate circumstances while still maintaining the integrity of key infrastructure.

Its an interesting scenario. because if the ship suddenly decided to turn around and head for the closest, most densely populated costal city... what can they do about it?

Blow it up? its ALREADY close enough to cause significant damage.

Somehow sink it without detonating it? The environmental damage alone would be devistating to the econcomy...

if this is a russian plot, it's already increadibly successfull.

Offload the cargo at sea to another boat? Barring that, flood it compartment by compartment and pump the fluid into other boats (to be later dried and re-packaged) or into the ocean (the ocean is big). Then bring the ship in to repair the hull or to salvage it.QED.

This can all be done at sea. Of course, someone has to pay.

Can't it be dragged to the Kaliningrad port? That would be the perfect place to store the ammonium nitrate.

I'd say, bring it as far as you can from any human being, and detonate the shit out of it, it has like 7 times more shit on it than the one in Beirut? And you want to dock it somewhere?

Since what happened in Beirut, how do we allow to have so much explosive on a single ship?

> Ammonium nitrate is highly explosive, especially when exposed to fire

Is that true? It seems, from a pedestrian perspective, if just fire could trigger it, they wouldn’t be transporting it in such amounts.

I'm unclear where the ammonium nitrate was meant to be shipped to. You'd think they could continue to there, possibly with the aid of tugs.

TIL you could wreck the whole international economy/market/political order with a few well placed shipwrecks

ammonium nitrate is safe till you accidentally mix it with something like fuel oil.

It would be trivial for an inspector to go look and see if such mixing has occurred... and if it has not, let it into port to sell the cargo.

Curiously no one say who have bought the fertilizer... Ask yourself why, to ask yourself why the war in the first place.

Let it sink!

The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.

The hybrid war angle is wild conspiracy theorising. If the Russians wanted to blow up an English city they might as well drop bombs on it directly.

I still wouldn't want to be near a fertiliser ship though so it'd be reasonable to tell it to go somewhere else.

I hope they evacuate the crew and bomb it in the middle of the ocean so we can film the explosion in 4K. Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen.

The only Western asset that has been sabotaged was Nordstream, by either the U.S. or the Ukrainians (now the official story is that Zalushny ordered it).

CEPA is a propaganda site:

https://cepa.org/article/wake-up-nato-its-sabotage/

"European energy security and the continent’s critical infrastructure are the core pillars of Transatlantic security. Safeguarding them is fundamental to ensuring democratic resilience and stability."

In light of Nordstream, this is hypocritical and offensive to Western Europeans who suffer the economic consequences.

Yes, the Russian invasion is bad, yes, they should get out of Ukraine, but repeatedly manufacturing additional stories is counterproductive.