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The Russian spy ship in Britain’s waters preparing ground for war
A confrontation with Yantar may have looked peaceful but for Royal Navy, the fight is below the surface

Senior Foreign Correspondent
29 January 2025 11:57am GMT


Sailing off the south coast of England, the Russian trawler known as the Yantar carried its usual array of hi-tech equipment.
In photographs released by the Ministry of Defence, a large radar dome can be seen behind two masts bristling with antennae.
Officially, these allow the 108 metre-long craft to monitor ocean currents, befitting a vessel the Kremlin maintains is part of its oceanographic research fleet.


But it was the ship’s more nefarious purposes that prompted a rare display of British naval power on Jan 20, when the Yantar was confronted by a British warship, HMS Somerset, and patrol vessel HMS Tyne.


Humdrum though it may appear, the Yantar is known to carry two submersibles that can dive down up to 6,000 metres, allowing their crew to map, monitor and potentially sever the undersea cables that transmit data around the world.
 

    1Gathering intelligence on US acoustic sensors near Kings Bay Naval Base, Georgia
    2Monitoring communications around the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
    3Recovery or destruction of equipment on board crashed Russian SU-33 and Mig-29 aircraft
    4Assisting Argentina in recovery of missing submarine
    5Attempting to retrieve crashed British F-35
    6Mapping UK undersea cables off the coast of Cornwall and in the Irish sea
    7Investigating sinking of Russian cargo ship Ursa Major and potentially destroying secret equipment
    8A second sortie to UK waters within weeks of being escorted away to the Mediterranean

“Let me be clear, this is a spy ship,” said John Healey, the Defence Secretary, as he revealed the Royal Navy operation last week.
And while the encounter looked peaceful from above, analysts and former navy officers told The Telegraph that Britain is likely to be already engaged in direct conflict with Russia’s “dark fleet”, deep underwater and out of sight.


In the images released by the MoD, a third ship looms over the Yantar, RFA Proteus. The £65 million auxiliary ship, completed in 2019, also possesses submersibles – only these have the kind of claws needed to sever the cables connecting Yantar to its mischief-making deep-sea craft.


“I reckon by now the Yantar will be missing some of its equipment,” said Tom Sharpe, a former Royal Navy submariner. “If it isn’t, it should be.”
The details of underwater battles typically remain shrouded in secrecy for decades, observed only by passing sea life as they take place.
The last British submarine known to have severed a cable was HMS Conqueror in 1982. Fresh from firing the missiles that sank Argentina’s Belgrano in the Falklands War, it cut an acoustic array trailed by a Soviet trawler.
 

    1Navigation and tracking other vessels, including Nato ships
    2Deep-sea submersibles, the Rus and the Konsul, can dive to 6000m
    3Poistioning system that allows the Yantar to loiter in the same place for prolonged periods of time
    4Transmitting data to Russian naval command, electronic jamming systems and communication intercepts
    5Helicopters can perform reconnaissance to back-up underwater operations

“Thank goodness it was one of our submarines” to have performed the daring operation, said a jubilant Margaret Thatcher.
Similar efforts are likely under way today, said Dr Sidharth Kaushal of the Royal United Services Institute think tank. “I would be surprised if… efforts to outcompete each other just short of the threat of war by both Russian submariners and Western ones are not occurring.”
The Yantar is an openly provocative target. For almost a decade, the 60-crewed ship has trailed undersea cables around the world, its position revealed through the pings it sends to the Automatic Identification System, a global maritime tracking network.


From Guantanamo Bay to the North Sea, it is suspected of mapping out Nato’s critical underwater infrastructure to prepare for eventual conflict.
The global internet network relies on around 500 undersea cables, with 60 or so running through Britain. The most important of these travel across the Atlantic and carry critical financial data between Wall Street and the City.
In a worst-case scenario, the Yantar could be dropping charges on those cables to be detonated in the event of war, said Mr Sharpe.

Matt Western, the chairman of the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy, told The Telegraph that the consequences of an attack would be “grim”, hitting “communications, essential services relying on the internet, the finance sector, payments systems, supply chains and so on”.
Russia’s dark fleet is already suspected of four sabotage operations in the Baltic since November, severing cables connecting Estonia to Latvia, Sweden to Lithuania and Norway to Finland and Germany.


To knock out the UK’s internet connection, dozens of cables would have to be severed simultaneously. Some analysts speculate that, besides threatening such a strike, the Yantar’s probing missions could serve another purpose.
“I think they probably want to go after critical military cables and discriminate those from the wider network,” Mr Kaushal said. The location and purpose of such cables is classified, but when bad weather severed one off the US coast in 2007, it grounded the army’s Iraqi drone fleet for a week.


HMS Somerset tracked the movements of Russian spy ship Yantar through UK waters
HMS Somerset tracked the movements of the Russian spy ship through UK waters on Jan 20 Credit: Royal Navy
In his statement to Parliament last week, Mr Healey revealed a British submarine had surfaced near the Yantar during a sortie it made into British waters in November.


The nuclear-class Astute submarine could have lurked underneath the Yantar for “days”, Mr Sharpe suggested, potentially getting close enough to take photographs of its hull and “map the underwater fittings”.
In revealing itself to the Russian craft, the submarine provided a clear show of force to the Kremlin, but the breaching carries risks. Moscow will now be able to monitor any sensor data the Yantar collected in the hours before, listening for any tell-tale acoustic signals left by the not-quite silent boat.


In the Russian military, Gugi is the agency responsible for deep-sea espionage, reporting directly to the ministry of defence rather than the navy. Its officers were “very capable”, Mr Sharpe said, informed by decades of experience over the Cold War.
The Soviet Union built up the world’s second-largest fishing fleet in the early 1970s and converted dozens of trawlers into spy ships, taking advantage of their hardiness and large amounts of hangar space.
‘Godforsaken pieces of junk’


When a US navy destroyer approached a Soviet vessel lurking off the coast of Virginia in 1964, the ship’s captain reported that the small craft “spun on a dime”. “They may have looked like godforsaken pieces of junk, but they were manned by talented crew”.
Four years earlier, Harold Macmillan, Britain’s prime minister, warned that the presence of fishing trawlers near a weapons testing range at Aberporth, Wales, was bringing the Soviet Union “perilously close to a showdown with the West”.


That Russia is able to deploy much the same tactics decades on from the Cold War stems from the protections afforded to civilian vessels under international laws around freedom of navigation. “If you want to protect against it,” you may have to compromise fundamental principles like the ability of civilian ships to sail – and collect intelligence – through international waters, said Katja Bego, a research associate at Chatham House.
That could have knock-on effects on international shipping through the Red Sea or the tense waters in the western Pacific. Russia, which denies any spying, has already threatened to deploy warships to “protect” its civilian fleet.


In part, this is a riposte to the West’s increasing naval muscle. In December, Finnish commandos boarded the Eagle S, the trawler suspected of severing the Estlink 2 power cable in the Gulf of Finland. They found the ship “bristling” with spy equipment that allowed it to monitor Nato ships and aircraft, Lloyds List reported.


Could British commandos be called upon to board the Yantar, if its brazen snooping continues?
“Other countries have boarded and detained vessels suspected of sabotage,” Mr Western said, days after announcing an inquiry into Britain’s undersea defences. “The committee’s inquiry will take a close look at what powers and capabilities the UK has, and how well they are being used.”


Lawyers should already be working on establishing the legal basis for a boarding operation, Mr Sharpe added. There would be little point in the SBS speeding out of Poole only to have to turn back half-way. As ever, the risk of conflict spirals in a direct confrontation. No Royal Navy sailor will forget the fate of commander Lionel Crabb, who was deployed to examine the underwater hull of the Ordzhenikidze, a Soviet cruiser that docked in Portsmouth in 1956. His body, missing its head, was found floating in the waters nearby.

 

Edited by Bevo
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2 hours ago, Viper said:

I mean, I guess this is a step in the right direction, but I wonder if he toned down the pro-Russian rhetoric only because he was interviewing Zelenskyy. Also, "I would like Ukraine to remain a country," is a pretty fucking low bar.

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On 7/12/2022 at 5:03 PM, BearSchlong said:

1st LT BearSchlong Jr arrived home from Poland today. Shifting good vibes to the men and women of the 101st that relieved the 82nd.

During the Battle of the Bulge, my father and his 9th Armored buddies finally allowed to leave the fortified goose-egg they created at the crossroads town of St. Vith, and were only able to disengage from the German offensive when the 82nd airborne reached them, making a narrow pathway to withdraw without being annihilated on Christmas Eve.

He said “if you ever meet a member of the 82nd airborne, buy them a drink for me.”

Buy your son a drink for my father, and us middlemen will figure logistics out later.

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