| Welcome to Bw Daily, the Bloomberg Businessweek newsletter, where we'll bring you interesting voices, great reporting and the magazine's usual charm every weekday. Let us know what you think by emailing our editor here! If this has been forwarded to you, click here to sign up. And here it is … For almost a decade, the Russian navy has been visiting World War II-era shipwrecks, removing military equipment in what some argue is a violation of international law, restoring it and displaying it in military parades and museums, according to an analysis of satellite imagery. The haul has included six to 10 tanks taken from two US cargo ships, the SS Thomas Donaldson and SS Ballot, which were torpedoed by the Nazis while they were in military service and now lie in Russian territorial waters at the bottom of the Barents Sea, according to the Maritime Observatory, a nonprofit initiative that uses satellite imagery, vessel-tracking signals and artificial intelligence to protect underwater cultural heritage. In addition to Sherman and M3 Lee tanks, Russia has taken away guns and an entire train, using a large tool known as a grabber. The most recent salvage operation seems to have taken place in October 2022, according to Giles Richardson, senior archaeologist at the Maritime Archaeology Sea Trust (MAST), which runs the Maritime Observatory. Such operations have paused each year over the winter, so Richardson expects Russia's Northern Fleet to return in the next few months. The Russian Ministry of Defense didn't respond to a request for comment.  A World War II era M3 Lee tank retrieved from the bottom of the Barents Sea. Photographer: Russian Northern Fleet/TASS/ZUMA Press Taking large items from shipwrecks allows the navy to train specialist divers and test equipment such as mini-submarines and unmanned underwater vehicles, according to a series of blog posts published by Russia's Ministry of Defense. The same skills and equipment could be used to sabotage underwater infrastructure, including telecommunications cables and pipelines, according to Richardson. "The Northern Fleet's tank salvage publicly demonstrates the level of equipment and expertise needed for a sabotage operation like Nord Stream," he says, referencing a September 2022 incident in which explosions damaged natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. Multiple governments have described the explosions as sabotage, but a culprit hasn't been definitively identified. Russia has suggested Western governments played a role, allegations that US officials have dismissed. Independent defense analyst H.I. Sutton says the salvage operations can be useful for training naval staff for "seabed warfare," which includes the sabotage of underwater infrastructure, although he says it isn't possible to draw a direct line to Nord Stream. Sutton says the main vessel involved in the 2022 salvage activity, a crane ship named Kil 143, was previously involved in the 2018 recovery of a nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile—"one of Putin's super weapons"—that crashed into the sea in 2017. The activity is being carried out without the permission of the US government, which still owns the vessels. Ian McConnaughey, spokesman for the US Naval History and Heritage Command, says doing so violates US and international laws requiring authorization to excavate or break up state-owned shipwrecks. He cites the Sunken Military Craft Act, enacted by the US in October 2004. "Its primary purpose is to preserve and protect from unauthorized disturbance all US sunken military craft, while also affording protections to foreign sunken military craft that lie within US waters," he says. About the time the law was passed, the Russian government said in a statement that, under the international law of the sea, "all the sunken warships and government aircraft remain the property of their flag State." The two ships the equipment was taken from were part of Arctic convoys that traveled between the UK and US and the former Soviet Union in the early 1940s to deliver essential supplies to help the Soviets repel a Nazi invasion. The ships in question were civilian vessels engaged in military service, not warships, but the team at MAST says they should be treated as war graves and not desecrated. There were 44 dead or missing crew on the SS Ballot and four on the SS Thomas Donaldson. "These are shared heritage war graves. People died in the shared pursuit of defeating fascism," says Richardson. "So you should leave them alone." —Olivia Solon, Bloomberg technology editor | 
No comments:
Post a Comment