Journalism Students Expose Russian-linked Vessels Off The Dutch And...

Seven German journalism students tracked Russian-crewed freighters lurking off the Dutch and German coast—and connected them to drone swarms over military bases.Let me walk you through what Michèle Borcherding, Clara Veihelmann, Luca-Marie Hoffmann, Julius Nieweler, Tobias Wellnitz, Sergen Kaya, and Clemens Justus pulled off.

Just so you know, I’m familiar with them. I did a long OSINT training with them in Berlin. I can tell you: they went far beyond anything I taught them. The physical verification alone—chasing a ship across France, the Netherlands, and Belgium—that’s not something you learn in a classroom.

On the night of May 16, 2025, two ships were sitting in suspicious positions. The HAV Dolphin—flagged in Antigua & Barbuda—had been circling in Germany’s Kiel Bay for ten days. Not delivering cargo. Just loitering, 25 kilometers from defense shipyards where drone swarms had been spotted on three separate days.

Meanwhile, 115 kilometers away off the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog, her sister ship the HAV Snapper had sailed out and parked in open water. It positioned itself exactly two hours before seven drones appeared over a Russian freighter being escorted by German police through the North Sea. It stayed there for four days and made silly circles.

That Russian freighter, the Lauga—formerly named “Ivan Shchepetov”—had visited Syria’s Tartus port the previous summer. Russia’s only Mediterranean naval base. Where Russian submarines dock.

Coincidence? That’s what the students from the Axel Springer Academy decided to find out. What followed was a five-week investigation involving leaked classified documents, tens of thousands of ship tracking data points, a 2,500-kilometer car chase across three countries, and—in a delicious bit of turnabout—their own drone flight over one of the suspect vessels.

“Wir haben zurück-gedrohnt,” they told their audience today during a presentation of the project. We droned back.The scale of the problem

Let’s start with the numbers that German authorities didn’t want public.

According to classified BKA reports obtained by the team: 1,072 incidents involving 1,955 drones in 2025 alone (as of November 19). Forty-five percent occurred in evening hours. Drone swarms flew “almost exclusively over or near military installations.”

In only 29 of 498 investigated cases could drone pilots be identified. In none of those cases were they state actors. In 88 percent of cases, authorities couldn’t even identify the drone type.

Source: HackerNews