Reefer with shady connections to occupied Crimea is zigzagging outside Norway's Arctic coast
The refrigerated cargo ship Avunda Reefer has Russian owner interests with links to occupant forces in Crimea. For more than two weeks, the 132-metre-long vessel has crisscrossed in the Barents Sea.
The ship has over the past five years operated mostly in West Africa and East Asia. But its history can be traced back to the Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that has been under occupation by Russia since 2014.
The Avunda Reefer sails under the flag of Panama and is officially managed by the Yustat Group, an entity registered in Malta.
But the actual owners of the reefer, as well as its five sister ship, are located in Russia.
According to a news report from a Crimean exile group, the Avunda Reefer and its owners are part of an international fish mafia network.
Since 2015, the ship has been owned by the Lilium Shipping Company. The same year, the ship management was taken over by Yugreftransflot, a company originally established in Sevastopol in 1994. As Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, the management was transferred to the Yustat Group, data from shipping information system Equasis shows.
Information from an international shipping register show that the three companies are closely linked with each other. All of them are registered at the same address in St. Petersburg — the address of Yugreftransflot.
A key person behind the development of the Yugreftransflot is Viktor Kot.
Kot is a veteran in the Russian shipping industry. He is also member of a Russian state working group on development of ships designed for sailing in the Arctic. Reportedly, among his latest projects is the Ivan Papanin, a new Russian class of icebreaking patrol vessels.
In an interview with Russian state propaganda agency Tass in 2021, Kot said that refrigerated transport ships developed by Yugreftransflot can carry containers with the Kalibr-K missile system and thus complement naval vessels in the Arctic.
"The Ivan Papanin-class Arctic refrigerated cargo ship can accommodate the Kalibr-K mobile missile system. This will require three standard cargo containers, which can be loaded on board and unloaded ashore using 40-tonne ship cranes," he told Tass.
In another interview, Kot recalls how he and his company built cooperation between the ports of Sevastopol and Tartus, Syria.
The Yugreftransflot and the Yustat Group are mentioned in the Paradise Papers, a 2017 leak of 13.4 million documents detailing the offshore financial arrangements of politicians, corporations, and wealthy individuals.
The Avunda Reefer and the Lilium Shipping are are mentioned in a report by Greenpeace (2020) on illegal transhipment at sea of fish. The report connects them to the Lavinia Corporation, a Greek company owned by the Laskaridis brothers.
According to the news report from a Crimean exile group, the ship name Avunda Reefer leaves no doubt about its connections to the Crimea. Avunda is Crimean Tatar name of a small river that runs into the Black Sea.
On November 14, the ship had course for the Bear Island, the island located halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the Svalbard archipelago.
After Norway joined EU sanctions against the Murmansk-based fishery companies Norebo and Murman Seafood, the number of Russian trawlers fishing in Norwegian waters has dropped significantly.
Judging from ship traffic data, there was on November 14 only one Russian trawler in the area north of the Bear Island - the Melkart-4.
