Russian intelligence vessel in DK waters

In October this year, a brand new Russian intelligence vessel from Russia’s top-secret military program GUGI (Ed: Russian Defence Ministry’s Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research) left a shipyard in Kaliningrad and headed for Denmark. Here, the ship arrived in Danish waters on the evening of 14 October, and at 2 o’clock at night it stopped in the waters around Fehmarn for more than a day, where it sailed in zigzag motions over a small piece of seabed. Today, Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet can reveal data on the basis of publicly available position data shared by the ship’s own AIS transmitter and described by several OSINT (Ed: Open Source Intelligence) analysts on X.
     According to the data, it also took more than eight hours before the small German coastguard ship Neustadt arrived in the Fehmarn Belt and close to the Evgeny Gorigledzhan, which is designed to map communication cables and pipelines on the seabed, among other things using two manned mini-submarines.
     The spy ship is also capable of sabotaging critical infrastructure, and pictures in Danwatch and Ekstra Bladet show that soldiers on board were armed with machine guns. GUGI reports directly to Putin and the General Staff in Moscow.
     That a modern Russian spy ship has apparently been able to sail completely undisturbed around Denmark for several hours surprises naval captain and military analyst at the Centre for Military Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Jens Wenzel Kristoffersen. “Anyone who sits in a command centre and follows the shipping traffic should be wondering here. After all, it is not a civilian ferry, it is a special unit. This should immediately have set off the loudest alarm bells,” says Wenzel Kristoffersen.
     “It seems very, very strange that we don’t seem to be keeping a better eye on what’s going on. Based on the AIS data, it appears that it takes as long as eight hours for a small German coastguard ship to arrive. Eight hours in the middle of the night, where this vessel is sailing back and forth doing something. And you have to remember that this is not just anyone. GUGI is well known. These are top professional people,” Wenzel Kristoffersen says. Russian naval ships have the legal right to pass through Denmark, but it is unusual for them to make longer stops.
     En route through Denmark, Evgeny Gorigledzhan was not shadowed by the Danish patrol vessel Diana until it had passed Anholt. Jens Wenzel Kristoffersen does not want to speculate on what the Russians have been doing in Denmark and around the Fehmarn Belt, but it seems “certainly suspicious”, he believes. “I can only say that the ship has not just been in transit. Nor is it normal for a ship of this category to sail back and forth on more or less the same opposite courses for a long time, unless it is a diversion and to attract the attention of the authorities,” he says. /Danwatch/