Tracing Russia‑linked shipping in the Baltic Sea
What open sources reveal about the ships behind the Baltic’s maritime security incidents in the first half of 2026.
We help maritime, customs and sanctions authorities identify the vessels, operators and flags behind hybrid activity at sea.
Our approach
Our analysis team reduced each incident to the vessels involved, giving 117 uniquely identified ships.
Every vessel was cross‑referenced against EU, UN and OFAC sanctions lists, the Equasis registry and the shadow fleet tracker maintained by Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence, and its flag history was rebuilt.
Vessels under the Russian flag or designated as shadow fleet were then isolated for closer analysis.
Findings
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Flags now change every few months: among Russia‑linked vessels, the median interval between successive flag changes has fallen from around seven years before 2022 to four or five months. The acceleration comes almost entirely from ships already re‑flagged several times.
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Cargo ships under naval escort: in January and again in May, two sanctioned Russian‑flagged cargo ships left Baltic ports under Russian naval escort and were later reported at the Russian naval facility in Tartus. Both are linked to a sanctioned subsidiary of the Russian defence ministry’s logistics contractor.
- vessels identified
- 117
- Russia‑linked
- Nearly 2/3
- median interval between flag changes, before and after 2022
- 7 years → 4-5 months
Download the full note: escort patterns, flag histories, onboard security personnel and the enforcement response from coastal and EU states.
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