Its missions are thought to include cable cutting, laying of taps on undersea cables, and intelligence missions.
Dozens of fibre-optic cables span the globe and Nato also has dedicated military cables on the ocean floor. On board the Yantar there are devices designed for deep-sea tracking, as well as equipment for connecting to top-secret communication cables.
So do we think the Russians are engaged in intercepting messages, good old fashioned espionage or are they actually trying to take over the world by actively spreading fake news?
Personally I'm a bit skeptical of the fake news scaremongering. Is there any way of identifying what is Russian fake news and what is just conspiracy theorists talking nonsense?
Just having the boat in a sensitive area and having conspiracy theories and rumours about it is a win for the Russians. Who is to say they didn't start the rumour of the spy ships capabilities.
The important bit.
“This ship is transmitting on the automatic identification system and is outside Irish territorial waters.
“This activity is in line with the UN Convention on the Law Of the Sea (UNCLOS) rules for transit through international waters."
Only the arm chair warriors get riled up about this, its a big load of nothing.
If anyone wants to spy on the Russians then the Yantar can be found by looking here on the marinetraffic.com website. Just click on the latest position button.
Edit> Just reread the OP, it made me laugh " Russian spy ship is floating about off the west coast". If it wasn't floating then that would make more of a story
Its not only theorists blaming the russians for this that and the other its governments. I read yesterday that they blame them for vaccination scaremongering, anti vax protests, pro vax protests. What haven't they been blamed for. And as for taking over the world, well we know who wants to do that.
The Yantar carries a crew of 60 and was built in the Baltic port of Kaliningrad. It is the mothership for manned and unmanned deep-sea submersibles. It can deploy the three-man submersibles Rus and Konsul, which can dive to about 20,000ft.
Its missions are thought to include cable cutting, laying of taps on undersea cables, and intelligence missions.
When the Irish Times and the Epoch Times really really love each other, they lie very close together and from their special union is born a reporter who writes like this.
Thinking out loud, and trying to be occasionally less wrong...
Johnny Von Pintland wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 9:21 am
It’s a broader question than this thread, but why do so many dorks, dweebs, and neckbeards have such admiration for V Putin?
It's too big a question for a small answer but for some time there has been a subculture enamoured by the mystique of strongman philosophers such as Alexandr Dugin and his semi esoteric theories of Eurasian resistance to the hubris of US led liberalism.
Thinking out loud, and trying to be occasionally less wrong...
Johnny Von Pintland wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 9:21 am
It’s a broader question than this thread, but why do so many dorks, dweebs, and neckbeards have such admiration for V Putin?
I'd reckon the "strong man" thing appeals to them. The hyper masculine superhero genre in media appeals more to that demographic too, even when some of the same will rattle on about "toxic masculinity" in the same breath.
The actual Russians I know started off not liking him for the most part, but now are very much in his corner. As far as the average Russian sees it life pre Putin was decidedly much worse than post Putin. He's restored a lot of pride in the nation and culture. Something very much missing in aftermath of the Soviet Union falling.
Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
Wibbs wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 9:48 am
I'd reckon the "strong man" thing appeals to them. The hyper masculine superhero genre in media appeals more to that demographic too, even when some of the same will rattle on about "toxic masculinity" in the same breath.
The actual Russians I know started off not liking him for the most part, but now are very much in his corner. As far as the average Russian sees it life pre Putin was decidedly much worse than post Putin. He's restored a lot of pride in the nation and culture. Something very much missing in aftermath of the Soviet Union falling.
And while I am not in the Putin fangirls club at all I can understand the appeal of him. Though I imagine he is a very cruel person he does have a certain charisma. For a brief while a few years ago I thought Sergey Lavrov was one of the more sensible politicians globally when it came to "geopolitics".
Have not kept track of that world in quite some time though, so I don't know what is going on. The only thought that passes through occasionally when I glimpse at world politics now is how laughable it seems that for some US political demographics the answer to all ills, known and unknown, are the Russians dunnit.
I thought we had moved past that schtick decades ago.
Thinking out loud, and trying to be occasionally less wrong...
The obvious reasons for the speculation are, the Yantar has the required submarines on board, the Yantar is in the area where one of the connections runs between Ireland and UK, the depth of water would make work relatively easy, Ireland has no counter intelligence agency (press report) and of course the ship is Russian.
As with all these spy things there are just so many options. If anyone wants a 2 cents conspiracy theory how about the Russians are pretending to mess with this cable so that sensitive data is moved onto another cable they already have access to.
The Russians have always been quite clever with Psyops and getting maximum impact with a small budget. Simply positioning their craft above a cable route will mean that UK, US etc will be duty bound to deploy their own very expensive resources to check that the cables haven't been interfered with.
As for fake news and supposed Russian interference, that's just part of ongoing cyber wars between China, Russia, US, UK, North Korea etc. It does exist and can be confirmed by many cyber security professionals - and there are some very good Wired articles on that subject. The real issue for me is the automatic assumption that the brave white hats from the US/UK are defending themselves from nasty black hat operators in Russia, China, N. Korea and so on. Cyber wars are where other countries can offset the physical assets provided by the gargantuan US defence budget.
Cyclepath wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 10:29 am
The Russians have always been quite clever with Psyops and getting maximum impact with a small budget.
An interesting thing about the Cold War was the technology of spy planes. The US invested heavily in projects like the U2 and SR71 Blackbird and later orbital tech to spy on the Soviets. The Soviets didn't bother to nearly the same degree. They didn't have to, because a) the US was a more open country for spies to operate in and b) they could get more US citizens on board to spy for them and pass on secrets. Getting Soviets to spy for the Americans was much harder.
Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
A little anecdote a Italian friend has a friend high up in Italian military, and he told my friend about 5 years ago if Russia invaded the EU it would be at the Bay of Biscay in a week and there is nothing to stop it.
The best policy for Ireland is stay neutral and friendly.
Previously unseen official papers have revealed mistakes in a Cold War spy operation in Portsmouth in which a Navy frogman died.
Lionel "Buster" Crabb disappeared while spying on a Russian warship in Portsmouth harbour in 1956.
A year after he vanished a headless, handless body washed up in Chichester.
Government documents released by the National Archives at Kew describe the operation as bordering on "criminal folly".
Cdr Crabb disappeared on 19 April 1956 in Portsmouth harbour while spying on the Ordzhonikidze, which had brought Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin to the UK.
The incident was the inspiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond adventure Thunderball.
Mark Dunton, records specialist at the the National Archives in Kew, said: "While the files don't solve the mystery of exactly how Cdr Crabb met his death, they lay bare all of the blunders surrounding that operation in its entirety for the first time."
The files show Secretary to the Treasury Sir Edward Bridges' report in to the incident concluded it was a "thoroughly bad and unplanned" operation.
"No serious steps seemed to have been taken to conceal the movements of the participants or to plan any cover story," it said.
After he failed to emerge Whitehall officials thought he had either been spotted by the Russians and taken aboard alive, that he had been destroyed by Russian "counter measures", or that he had suffered a "natural mishap".
