Shadow Fleet Maneuvers Emerge in British Isles Waters
In waters off the coast of the British Isles, a tanker carrying sanctioned Russian oil sails drifts slowly towards a fishing vessel. The two ships briefly cross paths, before sailing away from each other once more.
To the naked eye, nothing has changed. But to authorities tracking international shipping, the vessels have switched identities. The tanker appears to be an innocent fishing vessel, and vice versa.
These manoeuvres, known as “handshakes”, are among the methods being used by Russia’s “shadow fleet” tankers to disguise their locations and avoid seizure by the UK and European nations.
AIS Manipulation: A Cat and Mouse Game
The aim is to manipulate automatic identification system (AIS) tracking, which sends live information on vessels’ identity, port of origin, position, and course to maritime authorities – particularly when passing through geographical choke points like the English Channel, where shadow tankers are at the greatest risk of interception.
Gonzalo Saiz Erausquin, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute who has been tracking changing behaviour by the shadow fleet, said there is “an active campaign to disguise those transits and operations to just get away with it”.
“As the routing has been diverted away from the English Channel and over the northern coast of Scotland and west of Ireland, that area has also seen increased AIS manipulation,” Erausquin said. “It aims to disguise any transit that might be happening, to confuse the trackers.”
Methods of Manipulation
There are several different methods of manipulating AIS data, including the “handshakes” where vessels temporarily switch identity; tampering with transponders to show false locations; or simply switching them off to “go dark”.
Joshua Tallis, a programme director at the Center for Naval Analyses, told The i Paper that AIS was vulnerable to manipulation because it was designed as a safety tool decades ago, when the current activity of the Russian shadow fleet was not envisaged.
AIS transponders are now being exploited in a “cat and mouse game” between these tankers and international authorities, Tallis said. “The ultimate goal is avoiding a boarding by what Russia would regard as a hostile entity.”
AIS Handshakes: A Temporary Obscuring of Identity
AIS “handshakes” allow vessels to swap identification numbers, national flags, and information on their ports of departure and arrival.
“So the vessel that’s under sanction is now steaming with the clean vessel’s AIS number, and they’ll often reconverge at a later point to swap back,” Tallis added. “It’s a way of temporarily obscuring the identity of the sanctioned vessel.”
In order for handshakes to work, both vessels must agree to exchange their details, which suggests that a secondary fleet of Russian-directed fishing trawlers may be operating alongside the Kremlin’s shadow tankers.
But the chain of command behind these smaller vessels is unclear, even to law enforcement agencies.
Original Article: The imitation game: How Putin’s shadow fleet tankers hide in plain sight — Co