The BBC has a slideshow of Russian celebrities and ordinary Muscovites out on horseback near the town of Mozhaisk, reenacting an Imperial Russian Hunt in costumes intended to resemble descriptions in War and Peace.

A Woman in Berlin — Eight Weeks in a Conquered City was first published in 1953.

Its anonymous author, describing herself only as “a pale-faced blonde, always dressed in the same winter coat,” had kept a diary of her own personal share of traumatic experience undergone by two million female residents of Berlin upon the arrival of the conquering Red Army in the closing days of April 1945 .

Raped repeatedly, the 34 year old author coldbloodedly determined to “find a single wolf to keep away the pack.” Working by candlelight, fingers “shaking as I write this,” the author recorded her ordeal in a clear-eyed and courageous diary account conspicuously lacking in anger or self pity.

Comparing notes with an old friend on all they have experienced, “How many times were you raped, Ilse? “Four, and you?” She is dismissive and deprecatory. “No idea, I had to work my way up the ranks from supply train to major.”

Her memoir sold badly when first published in the 1950s. Apparently people, after such a short post-war interval, were not eager to revisit the most shocking and painful episodes of WWII. In 2003, when it was republished after the author’s death, it became a bestseller.

The same year, the author was identified as Marta Hillers, a journalist who had studied at the Sorbonne and traveled extensively in Europe, including Russia, before the war.

A film based on the memoir, titled Anonyma – Eine Frau in Berlin, was released in Germany on 2008.

After several weeks of violence, fear, near starvation, and abasement, finding that she and her neighbors have managed to survive a Sunday of victory celebrations, she takes inventory of her situation.

(T)hings are looking pretty good for me. I’m healthy and refreshed. Nothing has harmed me physically. I feel extremely well armed for life, as if I had webbed feet for the mud, as if my fiber were especially supple and strong. I’m well equipped for the world, I’m not delicate — my grandmother used to haul manure. On the other hand, there are multiple minuses. I don’t know what in the world I should do. No one really needs me; I’m simply floating around, waiting, with neither goal nor task in sight. I can’t help thinking of a debate I once had with a very smart Swiss woman, in which I countered every scheme she put forward for improving the world by insisting that “the sum total of tears always stays the same”— i.e., that in every nation, no matter what flag or system of government, no matter which gods are worshiped or what the average income is, the sum total of tears, pain, and fear that every person must pay for his existence is a constant. And so the balance is maintained: well-fed nations wallow in neurosis and excesses, while people plagued with suffering, as we are now, may rely on numbness and apathy to help see them through — if not for that I’d be weeping morning, noon, and night. But I’m not crying and neither is anyone else, and the fact that we aren’t is all part of a natural law. Of course if you believe that the earthly sum of tears is fixed and immutable, then you not very well cut out to improve the world or to act on any kind of grand scale.

To summarize: I’ve been in twelve European countries; I’ve seen Moscow, Paris, and London, among other cities, and experienced Bolshevism, Parliamentarianism, and Fascism close up, as an ordinary person among ordinary people. Are there differences? Yes, substantial ones. But from what I can tell the distinctions are mostly ones of form and coloration, of the rules of play, not differences in the greater or lesser fortunes of common people, which Candide was so concerned about. And the individuals I encountered who were meek, subservient, and uninterested in any existence other than the one they were born to didn’t seem any unhappier in Moscow than they did in Paris or Berlin—all of them lived by adjusting their souls to the prevailing conditions.

No, my current gauge is an utterly subjective one: personal taste. I simply wouldn’t want to live in Moscow. What oppressed me most there was the relentless ideological schooling, the fact that people were not allowed to travel freely, and the absolute lack of any erotic aura. The way of life just wouldn’t suit me. On the other hand, I’d be happy in Paris or London, although there I’ve always had the painfully clear feeling of not belonging, of being a foreigner, someone who is merely tolerated. It was my own choice to return to Germany, even though friends advised me to emigrate. And it was good I came home, because I could never have put down roots elsewhere. I feel that I belong to my people, that I want to share their fate, even now.

But how? When I was young the red flag seemed like such a bright beacon, but there’s no way back to that now, not for me: the sum of tears is constant in Moscow, too. And I long ago lost my childhood piety, so that God and the Beyond have become mere symbols and abstractions. Should I believe in progress? Yes, to biggger and better bombs. The happiness of the greater number? Yes, for Petka and his ilk. An idyll in a quiet corner? Sure, for people who comb the fringes of their rugs. Possessions, contentment?

I have to keep from laughing, homeless urban nomad that I am. Love? Lies trampled on the ground. And were it ever to rise again I would always be anxious, could never find true refuge, would never again dare hope for permanence.

Perhaps art, toiling away in the service of form? Yes, for those who have the calling, but I don’t. I’m just an ordinary laborer, I have to be satisfied with that. All I can do is touch my small circle and be a good friend. What’s left is just to wait for the end. Still the dark and amazing adventure of life is beckoning. I’ll stick around, out of curiosity and because I enjoy breathing and stretching my healthy limbs.

Marta Hillers died in Switzerland in 2001, at the age of 90, without producing another book.

Piltdown Man, a case of scientific fraud now in the process of being eclipsed

Russia’s Institute of Economic Analysis has issued a report (21 pages in Russian) by N.A. Pivovarova, titled Is There Warming? The Case of Russia, whose explosive conclusions were summarized by the news agency Rionovosta.

On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country’s territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. …

IEA analysts say climatologists use the data of stations located in large populated centers that are influenced by the urban-warming effect more frequently than the correct data of remote stations.

Steve McIntyre, at Climate Audit, highlights the Russian report by quoting a pertinent Climategate email:

An email from Jones to Mann in March 2004 stated:

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

Hat tip to Ice Cap via James Delingpole at the Telegraph.

The DailyMail explains why the Climategate scandal is real, and why nobody should trust adjusted data from the world’s leading climate research centers after this.

The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’.

As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.

Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.

In the words of one, David Rind from the US space agency Nasa, it ‘looks like there were years around 1000AD that could have been just as warm’.

Keith Briffa from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), which plays a key role in forming IPCC assessments, urged caution, warning that when it came to historical climate records, there was no new data, only the ‘same old evidence’ that had been around for years.

‘Let us not try to over-egg the pudding,’ he wrote in an email to an IPCC colleague in September 2006.

‘True, there have been many different techniques used to aggregate and scale data – but the efficacy of these is still far from established.’

But when the ‘warmest for 1,300 years’ claim was published in 2007 in the IPCC’s fourth report, the doubters kept silent. …

some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.

Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD – yet the Earth still warmed.

Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America – who is now also the subject of an official investigation –was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.

Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple – I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

Another British scientist – Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre – wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.

Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] – I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’

Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem.

According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed – but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven

weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ – as simple as it was deceptive.

All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase.

On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated – but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’

Read the whole thing, which includes accounts of climate change activists successfully strongarming the press into altering news reports and which reports that the Russian State Security Service (FSB) has denied responsibility for the leaked emails.

Unfortunately dim 0:30 video

The Escapist describes the mysterious sign that appeared in the Norwegian skies, appropriately timed to mark Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.

Astronomers and Norwegian citizens alike have been baffled by the appearance of a strange blue spiral light in the sky above the Scandinavian country last night: Was it aliens, evil Russians, or just a Dante’s Inferno marketing stunt? …

Witnesses in the north of the country reported an unusual atmospheric phenomenon that began when “what appeared to be a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain. It stopped mid-air, then began to circulate … Within seconds a giant spiral had covered the entire sky. Then a green-blue beam of light shot out from its centre – lasting for ten to twelve minutes before disappearing completely.”

The Norwegian Meteorological Institute was hammered by a flood of telephone calls after the light show had concluded, though astronomers say that the startling display was not connected to the Aurora Borealis.

——————————————————-

Daily Tech reports that Russian news sources have identified the source of the phenomenon, and it had nothing to do with peace.

on Thursday the Russian newspaper Vedomosti cited a military source as saying the phenomenon was caused by a failed test launch of a intercontinental missile, dubbed Bulava. Past launches had failed on the first stage, but this launch reportedly went off without a hitch, before experiencing the strange failure on the third stage.

The Russia armed forces initially denied these reports. However, another source, stationed in Severodvinsk, told newspaper Kommersant that the Russian nuclear sub “Dmitri Donskoy” launched Monday for a program of test launches at sea. The “Dmitri Donskoy” is reportedly the only sub capable of launching the Bulava missile.

On Thursday, more than 24 hours after the incident Russia decided to take responsibility for the incident. The Ministry of Defense’s press service told ITAR-TSS that the strange show was indeed generated by a third stage failure of the missile.

There are still unexplained details about the event that are sure to excite conspiracy theorists. First of all the blue-green light would suggest the presence of copper(II) chloride in the rocket flame. However, copper chloride, while commonly used in pyrotechnics, isn’t hasn’t traditionally been used in rocket fuel (though it has been reportedly investigated as a catalyst in propellant reactions). Also strange is that a similar spiral and explosion occurred over China last year, according to the Daily Mail. If it was indeed the third stage that caused the scene over Norway, and no previous launch had made it past the first stage, it’s unclear what might have caused the similar scene in China.

Soon to be made in Venezuela for export throughout the hemisphere

It’s convenient for Putin and Chavez having Barack Obama in the White House. Not a lot of chance that we’ll be hearing about the Monroe Doctrine from this president.

Reuters:

Russia is building arms plants in Venezuela to produce AK-103 automatic rifles and cartridges and is finalizing contracts to send 53 military helicopters to the Andean nation, Moscow’s envoy to Venezuela said Monday.

Ambassador Vladmir Zaemskiy told a news conference that Russian engineers and Venezuelan construction firms were building the rifle and cartridge plants which, when operational, would employ more than 1,500 workers.

He gave no completion date for the plants under construction in the central state of Aragua.

Wired tells us Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) film accurately predicted a system put on-line in 1985 by the Soviets that would assure an automatic Soviet response to a Western first strike.

The Cold War ended years ago, but apparently the Russians never turned off their Doomsday device.

Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.

“The Perimeter system is very, very nice,” he says. “We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military.” He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn’t matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won’t discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they’ve never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. “I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that.” They weren’t.

The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase. But Yarynich takes the risk. He believes the world needs to know about Dead Hand. Because, after all, it is still in place.

Read the whole thing.

Reuters quotes the head of the Russian General Staff asserting that, despite Barack Obama’s surrender to Russian objections to basing US missile defenses in Central Europe, Russia is intending to proceed with placing new offensive short-range missiles in the Kaliningrad Oblast.

Russia’s top general said on Monday that plans to deploy missiles in an enclave next to Poland had not been shelved, despite a decision by the United States to rethink plans for missile defense in Europe. …

President Barack Obama’s decision to scrap a land-based missile defense system has been welcomed by Russia, which had threatened to deploy short-range Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad if the United States refused to drop the plans.

The Kremlin always said Russia would only deploy the missiles as a counter-measure if Washington went ahead with its missile shield. Moscow said the shield threatened its national security and would upset the strategic balance in Europe.

On Saturday Russian deputy defense minister Vladimir Popovkin said in an interview that “naturally we will scrap the measures that Russia planned to take” in response to the shield and specifically named Iskander deployment as one of them.

When asked about the matter on Monday, the chief of Russia’s general staff, Nikolai Makarov, said: “There has been no such decision. It should be a political decision. It should be made by the president.”

“They (the Americans) have not given up the anti-missile shield; they have replaced it with a sea-based component,” Makarov told reporters on a plane from Moscow to Zurich.

The general was accompanying President Dmitry Medvedev on a trip to Switzerland.

Debkafile, which reported August 29th a leak (apparently from Polish sources) that plans were underway to substitute defense facilities in Turkey and Israel for those originally intended to be sited in Poland and the Czech Republic, is now telling us that Obama has made a deal to site US missile defense systems on a Russian military base in Azerbaijan (!).

DEBKA also, with a note of contempt, reveals that the Israeli based systems is already in place and “working perfectly.”

DEBKA characterizes the Obama Administration’s move as a “surrender to Moscow.”

As Wired’s Nathan Hodge explains, Barack Obama is completely reconfiguring US missile defense plans in deference to Russia’s self-proclaimed right to point loaded and ready-to-fire weapons of mass destruction at neighboring European countries.

President Barack Obama yesterday announced that he would scrap George W. Bush’s plan to park missile-defense interceptors in Poland and place an X-band radar in the Czech Republic. Speaking yesterday to reporters, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered the new rationale.

“Over the last few years, we have made great strides with missile defense, particularly in our ability to counter short-and-medium-range missiles,” he said. “We now have proven capabilities to intercept these ballistic missiles with land-and-sea-based interceptors supported by much-improved sensors. These capabilities offer a variety of options to detect, track and shoot down enemy missiles. This allows us to deploy a distributive sensor network rather than a single fixed site, like the kind slated for the Czech Republic, enabling greater survivability and adaptability.”

In addition, Gates noted the Navy’s considerable test success with the missile-shooting Standard Missile-3 (pictured here), which has seen eight successful flight tests since 2007. Sea-based interceptors, he said, offer a much more flexible option than a fixed site.

Intriguingly, the new plan might include deploying an X-band radar to the Caucasus — the region sandwiched between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea — to keep an eye out for missile launches from Iran. Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright said stationing a radar in the Caucasus might reassure Russia, which was vehemently opposed to the Bush administration’s plan to place assets in Eastern Europe.

“The X-band radar is a single directional,” he said. “In other words, when you put it down, it points in a single direction. And it will be very clear that it is pointing south towards Iran.”

It’s easy to speculate about which countries in the region could potentially host an X-band radar. The United States has close military ties with Georgia. And neighboring Azerbaijan, which shares a border with Iran, has received U.S. funding for the construction of radar installations.

The idea of stationing an X-band radar in the Caucasus, however, is not new. Back in 2006, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) published a fact sheet that said mobile sensors for ballistic missile defense might be placed in an unnamed country in the Caucasus. The agency subsequently scrubbed the fact sheet to remove any mention of possible locales, although MDA spokesman Rick Lehner told me at the time that the region would be a “good location for a small X-band radar to provide tracking and discrimination of missiles launched from Iran.”

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Ben Smith, at Politico, says: There has to have been a behind-the-scenes deal here, involving a major change in Russian policy toward Iran in return for so enormous a concession, doesn’t there?

Republicans talked of President Obama “appeasing” Russia,” “betraying” Poland, and bringing back the Carter administration. They didn’t like his decision Thursday to scrap plans for a missle defense system in Poland and in the Czech Republic, and they dusted off some vintage Cold War anti-communist rhetoric and endorsements of missile defense to express it.

Obama and his aides cast the decision as almost a technical one. But for a president who has said repeatedly that he wants to return U.S. foreign policy to the hard-headed pursuit of national interests rather than scoring ideological points, it was also tangible evidence that he meant what he said.

Some members of Obama’s own party, however, had a simple question for the administration: if this was a return to realism, and a concession to Russia’s long and vocal opposition to the missile program, what, exactly, was the U.S. getting in return for fundamentally changing it?

And almost certainly, the answer leads back to Iran.

“If it turns out that the Russians now are willing to take a very tough stand on the next round of sanctions on Iran – for instance, in the Security Council — then you can say , ‘Hey, it’s a trade and it’s a good trade,” said Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “If the Russians don’t deliver something pretty substantial back, it does raise questions about what do they think they were achieving.”

—————————————-

But Barack Obama, while he was at Columbia, was an enthusiastic supporter of the nuclear freeze movement, organized internationally by a variety of Soviet front organizations, as this article published in a student newspaper in 1983 attests.

He liked unilateral disarmament back then, and it would not exactly be surprising to find that he likes it now, too.

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In fact, Russian press statements, with a certain ill-concealed glee, actually dismiss the idea of some kind of bargain with contempt.

RIA:

Russia’s NATO envoy has cautioned against “childish euphoria” over recent Washington’s decision to scrap plans for a missile shield in Central Europe. …

“We are already hearing voices in the West…that it is a huge concession to Russia. But I wouldn’t want us to become overwhelmed with some kind of childish euphoria,” Dmitry Rogozin said in an interview with the Vesti television late on Thursday.

The diplomat said Washington had simply corrected its own mistake and had chosen a more flexible and efficient approach to its global missile shield allegedly aimed against the ballistic missile threat from Iran.

Mystery of the Arctic Sea, 8/20

The Telegraph reports Intelligence leaks indicating that the hijacking was done by Mossad (not a peep from Debkafile!) and was done to prevent an unauthorized shipment of advanced Russian air defense missiles from reaching Iran.

Mystery has surrounded the ship, officially carrying a cargo of timber worth £1.3 million from Finland to Algeria, since its crew first reported a boarding in Swedish waters on July 24 after a raid by 10 armed English-speaking men posing as anti-narcotics police officers.

It was eventually recovered off the coast of west Africa on August 17. Russia has since charged eight men from Estonia, Latvia and Russia with kidnapping and piracy.

Russian officials have said the alleged pirates demanded a $1.5 million ransom but speculation has grown that the freighter was carrying contraband cargo.

Israeli and Russian security sources have questioned The Kremlin’s official explanation, instead arguing that the ship was carrying S-300 missiles, Russia’s most advanced anti-aircraft weapon, while undergoing repairs in the Russian port of Kaliningrad, a notorious Baltic smuggling base.

According to reports, Mossad is said to have briefed the Russian government that the shipment had been sold by former military officers linked to the black market, and Russia then dispatched a naval rescue mission. Those who believe Mossad was involved point to a visit to Moscow by Shimon Peres, Israel’s president, the day after the Arctic Sea was recovered.

Crew members of the Arctic Sea have since told Russian news reporters that they have been told not to disclose “state secrets” further fuelling the speculation.

A Russian military source told The Sunday Times: “The official version is ridiculous and was given to allow the Kremlin to save face.

“I’ve spoken to people close to the investigation and they’ve pretty much confirmed Mossad’s involvement. It’s laughable to believe all this fuss was over a load of timber. I’m not alone in believing that it was carrying weapons to Iran.”

S-300PMU2 Favorit

Russian news agency RT News (Moscow) has the same story on this 4:42 video

Russian freighter Arctic Sea

The world recently witnessed a real life Hunt for the Red October as Russia scrambled air and naval forces, and even deployed satellites, in a intensive search for the Arctic Sea, a perfectly ordinary freighter which had departed Kaliningrad carrying a cargo of timber destined for Algeria, and was hijacked in the Baltic by an unknown group of armed men.

ABCNews:

The hijackers of a cargo ship that disappeared off the coast of France threatened to blow it up if their ransom demands were not met, Russian news agencies said.

Russia has arrested eight people on suspicion of hijacking the Arctic Sea off the Swedish coast and sailing it to the Atlantic Ocean, ending weeks of silence about the fate of a ship which has intrigued European maritime authorities.

Limited information from Russian officials has failed to satisfy sceptics (sic) who voiced doubts about whether the piracy actually took place or was a convenient cover story to conceal a possible secret cargo of arms or nuclear material. …

The Maltese-registered, Russian-crewed vessel and its $1.3 million cargo of timber disappeared from radar screens three weeks ago, prompting speculation ranging from an attack by an organised crime gang to a top-secret spy mission.

The Malta Maritime Authority said on Tuesday, without elaborating, that the Arctic Sea had “never really disappeared”, a comment which increased speculation that security services might have been involved in the affair.

Russia has said the eight detainees were citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Russia who on July 24 boarded the ship, forced the crew to change route and turned off its navigation equipment.

After heading through the English Channel in late July, radio contact was lost and the 4,000-tonne ship did not deliver its cargo to the Algerian port of Bejaia on August 4.

The Russian navy found the missing ship on Monday in the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Verde.

The official version of events was questioned by Yulia Latynina, a leading Russian opposition journalist and commentator.

“The Arctic Sea was carrying something, not timber and not from Finland, that necessitated some major work on the ship,” she wrote in the Moscow Times newspaper on Wednesday.

During two weeks of repair works in the Russian port of Kaliningrad just before the voyage, the ship’s bulkhead was dismantled so something very large could be loaded, she wrote.

“To put it plainly: The Arctic Sea was carrying some sort of anti-aircraft or nuclear contraption intended for a nice, peaceful country like Syria, and they were caught with it,” she said.

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CS Monitor:

Political analysts and maritime security experts remain skeptical that the hijackers were merely interested in the crew or the ship’s cargo – a load of lumber bound for Algeria.

That bulky, low-value cargo was worth about $1.8 million, which makes the danger and expense of a takeover hardly seem worth it. “Hijacking lumber … it’s sort of like counterfeiting one dollar bills,” says John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a provider of defense and intelligence information. Mr. Pike calls the Arctic Sea incident an “out-of-pattern hijacking.”