Russia is massively misleading maritime services: oil export volumes are being underestimated by millions of tons every month

Russia is using electronic warfare to conceal the real routes of tankers and the volume of oil exports, experts warn.

Russia is actively using electronic warfare to distort data on maritime oil shipments, which leads to serious errors in calculating the volume of its exports. This was noted by the head of the Monitoring Group on Sanctions and Freedom of Navigation, Andriy Klymenko.

According to the expert, modern AIS systems and marine analytical services often become victims of spoofing – when the ship’s signal is deliberately distorted. As an example, Klymenko cites the voyage of one of the Russian tankers with a carrying capacity of almost 150 thousand tons.

On popular maritime services, this voyage was displayed as if the vessel had departed from Sevastopol on June 4. However, this is physically impossible – the ports of occupied Sevastopol are not capable of receiving tankers of such size and loading them with crude oil.

In fact, the tanker left the Sheskharis terminal in Novorossiysk on June 3, but thanks to spoofing, its route looked as if it had called in Sevastopol, Feodosia, Koktebel, and even “traveled” overland — from Alupka to Kachi.

“Any ultra-modern analytical program sees only a signal received from the coordinates of, for example, Sevastopol. And this is enough for the data to be considered correct for the report,” Klymenko explained.

According to the expert, due to such manipulations, the data of analytical centers on Russian oil exports are underestimated by 20–30% every month for the Baltic and Black Seas alone. This means that 4–5 million tons of Russian oil are not taken into account in the reports every month.

“The conclusion is simple: in the conditions of using electronic warfare, it is worth trusting not only technologies, but also people with natural intelligence. Russia knows perfectly well how to hide up to 30% of its bloody oil exports. And this is just one of 10-15 such methods,” Klymenko concluded.

As previously reported by USM, the Lithuanian Minister of Transport called on EU countries to prepare for a long-term threat to navigation systems from Moscow and Minsk.