Russian-crewed freighters linked to drones over military bases

Seven German journalism students tracked Russian-crewed freighters lurking off the Dutch and German coast—and connected them to drone swarms over military bases.

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.

Merry go round and round and round. Based on shipping data.

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.

What followed was a five-week investigation involving leaked classified documents, tens of thousands of ship tracking data points They were looking for anomalies. Cargo ships move from A to B. Efficiency matters. So when the team saw a ship track that looked like someone had scribbled furiously with a purple marker—loops, circles, ten days of chaos in Kiel Bay instead of a clean transit line—the audience laughed at how absurd it looked.

Please read further to see how they arrived at 19 correlations between ship positions and documented drone incidents

https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/they-droned-back