Accidents, not Russian sabotage, behind undersea cable damage, officials say

[reACTIONary]

46. Backtracking is certainly a suspicious maneuver....

... but I did a quick survey and could find no mention of it in any other reporting. Where did you read about that? Can you provide a source?

It is true that the "shadow fleet" of ships that transport sanctioned Russian oil - such as this one, the Eagle S - regularly turn off their transponders to avoid being tracked. Sometime they do so in order to meet up with another tanker mid-ocean and transfer oil from one ship to another.

There is satellite tracking, independent of the transponders, but it is spotty, because the satellites fly over quickly - there isn't 100% coverage making it hard to track a moving object. I know about some of this because I work for an organization that is developing satellite ship tracking software that can be used to spot suspicious behavior even with incomplete satellite coverage.

With the exception of the backtracking, all of this is typical of sanction evasion and is carried out regularly by the "shadow fleet". But even the backtracking might be part of an sanctions evasion strategy. In any case, I can't find a source for the backtracking - let me know where you learned of that.