To get the support infrastructure in place at Pankovo on Yuhzny Island has taken a lot of effort – and a lot of standard ISO ship containers.
These have been taken by several ships, mainly over the summer months, over two years. Due to weather and icing conditions during the winter period it is pretty impossible to do anything outside of the summer.
Recently the ships in use have been captured on satellite imagery – particularly on Sentinel. Over at Covert Shores, H I Sutton has just published a blog on the likely ships in use for this task. The activity around the islands has been tracked for quite some time however and this blog really just fully confirms the IDs of the ships Covert Shores had chosen as possibilities.
First of all, it can be confirmed it is Teriberka that is operating at the island harbour bay area – visible in a nice Sentinel graphic produced at Covert Shores. This ship has been to and from Arkhangelsk on at least three occasions since early August 2022.
Geolog Pechkurov can also be confirmed as the ship operating with Teriberka at the moment. She had been operating along with a research ship at the western end of the Matochkin Shar Strait between Severny and Yuzhny Islands early to mid-August, but returned with Teriberka mid September.
Both ships have their own cranes and lifting gear.
Probably the more unsual ship is Sevmorput – a nuclear powered container/cargo ship. It is large at 260 metres in length, with its own cranes and lifting gear. A considerable number of containers can be held on board.
Sevmorput has been in the area before and is likely to be the main carrier for most of the equipment and containers. Like the other two ships, operations here have been going on since at least mid-August with returns to Murmansk rather than Arkhangelsk.
Smaller barges are used to transport the containers from all the ships to the small jetty in the harbour bay area.
There’s not much more to say on this apart from that the amount of work that is needed to get operations running at Novaya Zemlya is considerable – and needs to be completed in a short time period due to weather conditions over the winter.
This means that time is running short for this period of activity – and also means should there be a test of Burevestnik, it can’t be too far away.
All S-AIS imagery taken from FleetMon
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