Akademic Ioffe is tracked as sailing as ‘passenger ship’ and ‘function unknown’
Portugal’s air force has this week monitored yet another ‘scientific vessel from Russia’ that was sailing through national waters.
In a statement, the air force said the operation took place while it was carrying out a routine monitoring mission to ensure the integrity and protection of Portugal’s Exclusive Economic Zone.
Having detected the vessel, the Akademik Ioffe (which is described on two vessel tracking sites as a passenger ship, on vesselfinder as having ‘function unknown’), it was monitored “in order to observe its activity”, the air force explained.
“In this way, the Air Force is reinforcing its surveillance of strategic space by ensuring a constant presence in movements in the area of national interest, making a significant contribution to the security and protection of waters under Portuguese jurisdiction,” said the release (see update below).
This was the 23rd mission this year to monitor a ship from a country not in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
So far this year, the air force says 35 Russian and two Chinese ships have already been monitored. There has been a lot of talk as to what the presence of these vessels means – with considerable focus on the possibility that they are ‘spying on underwater cabling’, with a view to future sabotage.
In an interview in May, Chief of Staff of the Navy, Admiral Gouveia e Melo, stressed how the number of Russian ships passing through Portuguese waters has quadrupled in the last three years.
“Three years ago the number of escorts we carried out was less than a dozen a year”, Gouveia e Melo explained. “Last year alone we did 46. These ships from the Russian Federation, which can be military or merchant but with known military activity, can transit our waters to go from position A to position B or they can have interests in our waters. And both things happen simultaneously,’ he said.
Update: military blogsite espada e escudo has posted maps to show what the Akademik Ioffe appears to be doing ‘en route for Recife in Brazil’: if this IS a passenger ship, the passengers will be getting dizzy:
https://x.com/EE_EspadaEscudo/status/1854667721666912317/photo/2
The area Akademik Ioffe is zig-zagging through is known as King’s Trough:
