In the absence of hard facts about the explosions in the Nord Stream gas pipelines Monday, speculation thrives. Such as: what was a Russian ship doing near there? And still the largest sailing ship in the world.
Built in Bremen in 1921, the Sedov carried saltpeter and grain, became a training ship for Russian sailors after 1945, and is now owned by the Kaliningrad University of Technology, the Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea. In 2015 the four-master was still guest at Sail Amsterdam.
You can hire it for a dinner with 200 people and there is a cinema room. But perhaps the Sedov is leading a double life? On websites like MarineTrafficwhich show ship movements, you could see how the Sedov stopped during the explosions east of the island of Bornholmstationary or slow moving.
Monday at 7:04 p.m., the time of the second explosion, it entered Sweden’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). On Tuesday it sailed parallel to the gas pipelines, and even sailed straight over them on Wednesday evening. The Sedov was then less than ten nautical miles (18.5 kilometers) within sight of the Nord Stream 1 leak.
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Also noteworthy: from Wednesday September 21 to Friday September 23, precise positions are missing, because the Sedov often had its AIS beacon off. The ship is then about thirty miles east of where the first explosion, in Nord Stream 2, will take place, early Monday morning.
“Can a sailing ship sabotage gas pipelines?” asks including a twitterer who uses the name of a novel character, Moryc Welt. “For example, by dropping divers, or by having a submarine hide under its hull?”
Maybe the Kremlin is collecting raw material for memes
It’s all conceivable (especially the latter). Simpler explanations – also for faltering AIS – are more plausible. “Russian ships in the Baltic Sea are nothing out of the ordinary,” defense analyst Stefan Lundqvist said to the Swedish newspaper aftonbladet. The Mir, another large sailing vessel, was also on its way there, as were Russian freighters and offshore vessels. “Nothing that doesn’t belong in a normal traffic picture.” It is possible, but “there is no evidence for or against,” said Jukka Savolainen, a Finnish defense specialist against the Helsinki Sanomat.
But even without a direct connection to the explosions, the Sedov plays a role, suggested twitterer Markus Jonsson: in psychological warfare. “Maybe the Kremlin is there collecting raw material for memes,” the bite-sized images and ideas that are spreading through social media. The Sedov is now back at Kaliningrad.