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Does the Urgent Russian Response to the Hijacking of the Arctic Sea Reflect Concern for the Crew or For a Secret Cargo?
On August 17 the Russian patrol vessel Ladny apprehended and boarded the Maltese-flagged, Finnish owned cargo ship Arctic Sea, which had apparently been hijacked in Swedish waters three weeks earlier. The rescue operation – accomplished “without a shot being fired,” according to the Russian navy – marked the end of the three-week long mystery of the missing cargo vessel. But the subsequent criminal investigation may well last longer, and prove even more enigmatic than the ship’s original “disappearance.”
The Russians, along with the Swedes, Finns and the Maltese, are now claiming that the Arctic Sea was never “lost” at all, and experts believe that the speed with which the Russian navy apprehended the stolen vessel (the navy was deployed on August 12, and the Ladny caught the Arctic Sea five days later) backs up that claim. Even if a vessel can turn off its Automated Identification System (AIS), “if you know what vessel you’re looking for, and you have satellite tracking and so on, it’s actually pretty easy,” said one maritime expert who asked not to be named.
So that’s one mystery solved. If one accepts that releasing details of the investigation would have endangered the crew’s lives (and not everyone will), then the authorities’ silence becomes understandable.
One reason the case has caused so much head-scratching is that it has flouted all the conventions of piracy that the maritime world has become accustomed to in recent years. “Somali pirates are successful because they can take refuge in a lawless state,” said Stephen Askins, a London-based maritime lawyer experienced in handling piracy cases. “Drifting about off Cape Verde with a vague rumor of a ransom demand suggests a lack of a clear exit strategy.”
And the differences do not end there. The international anti-piracy force has found it difficult to free ships captured off Somalia because the pirates tend to put up a fight and use their prisoners as hostages. But the hijackers of the Arctic Sea apparently gave up without a fight. And now the Russians have taken the robust step of flying them to Moscow to stand trail, something that has almost never happened to captured Somali pirates.
Normal procedure after a Somali hijacking would be to head for a port of refuge, repair the ship, perhaps repatriate the crew, and allow the vessel to continue to its port of destination to deliver its cargo. Instead the Russians seem to be treating the Arctic Sea as a pirate ship, rather than a ship captured by pirates. The Basmanny District Court has issued a writ seizing the ship, and the Russian navy is towing the vessel to Novorossiysk, apparently without stopping to unload its timber in Algeria. And rather than being released, the crew has apparently been detained in Moscow for what Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Investigative Committee, called “urgent interrogation.”
The legal wrangles begin
The suspects have already been assigned lawyers, who in turn lost no time in appealing their arrest by the Basmanny District Court, citing procedural violations. The men’s lawyers have even questioned Russia’s jurisdiction. “The cargo ship was hijacked on July 24 in Swedish territorial waters, the vessel was carrying cargo from Finland to Algeria, and sailed under the Maltese flag,” Omar Akhmedov, representing two of the suspects, told the Kommersant daily.
Actually, in this case the Russians probably have a good claim to jurisdiction. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), each state has jurisdiction to try anyone apprehended for piracy on international waters – regardless of the attackers’ nationality. And as a signatory to the convention on Suppression of Unlawful Acts at Sea (SUA), Russia may take action if its nationals are the victims of piracy or terrorism.
Nonetheless, the trial promises to get interesting. Although it will be held in Moscow, under Russian law, the investigation includes no less than four other countries; Malta, where the Arctic Sea is registered; Finland, where the company that owns the vessel is based and from where the Arctic Sea set sail; Sweden, in whose waters the alleged hijacking took place; and Estonia, where six of the eight suspects are permanent residents (the other two are Latvian).
To further complicate things, only one of those six is actually an Estonian citizen. Of the other five, two are Russian passport holders, and three are stateless persons on “grey” passports. All are reported to be Russian speakers. The Estonian prosecutor’s office says it has not yet decided whether to ask Russia for extradition, but a criminal case has also been opened in Estonia. Piracy carries a twenty-year sentence in both jurisdictions, so it seems likely that the two sides will be able to come to some arrangement over where the convicts serve their sentences.
But like any well-crafted piece of crime fiction, the heart of the mystery is the motive. On this score the authorities have been as tight-lipped in their public pronouncements as the press has been exuberantly creative. Bastrykin told the Rossiskaya Gazeta daily in an interview on Wednesday that he could not “rule out that the ship was carrying not only timber.” Given the audacity of the attack and the urgency of the Russian response, the Russian media have already ruled out everything but that.
The “secret cargo” has been variously described as nuclear material (denied by the Finns, who carried out a dock-side radiation test), drugs, or weapons. A theory first floated by the liberal Novaya Gazeta weekly says the weapons in question were anti-aircraft and cruise missiles destined for Iran, and that the “pirates” were in the pay of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Moskovsky Komsomolets in turn claimed that the hijacking was the work of “the special services of a European Union country,” intending either to “blackmail Russia in the international arena” or simply looking to make a quick profit in the knowledge that the owners of the contraband “were unlikely to kick up a big fuss.”
Bastrykin says the Arctic Sea is being towed to Novorossiysk to get to the bottom of these claims. Cynics respond that the plan is to remove the embarrassing cargo, not to discover it. Meanwhile, the Arctic Sea has not reappeared on AIS tracking services since it disappeared in the Bay of Biscay. To the eyes of the world, it is as lost as it was three weeks ago. 
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