ASTROL 1 is a largely flat cargo ship with hatches that likely would serve well as drone pads.
She is a similar model to SCANLARK, recently apprehended by German authorities on drone suspicions and to PORT OLYA 4, drone import ship on Iran trade. Sunk by Ukraine.
At time of drone attack start ASTROL 1 was just 35-40 km to the southeast of Copenhagen airport, having passed the hours before.
The night before she spent zig-zaging Kattegat, as if to arrive timely to destination?
Sunk ship PORT OLYA did these tracks last year, highly likely importing drones or other armaments from Iran to Russia in Caspian Sea.
ASTROL 1 did at least three similar trips last 12 months, last in Feb 2025.
Very circumstantial, but in this photo ASTROL 1 is maneuvering right in front of known gun runner SPARTA IV. Photo taken in 2021. Kaliningrad? St Petersburg?
The case presented here is of course highly circumstantial.
ASTROL 1 is steaming south of Gotland. 4 hours ago she left normal traffic patterns and made a turn for Gotland.
I'll leave for the marine commands to decide if she is possible to apprehend and worthy of it.
Oh, almost forgot. With AIS we always run the risk of looking at a falsified track. A ship similar in shape to ASTROL 1 passes a webcam with a good match to the AIS-track, yesterday morning, north of Helsingør. This gives more credibility to the AIS-track being true.
Unless ASTROL 1 turns she will be on Swedish waters in 90 minutes. Ripe for picking.
Closest openly advertized NATO units is a Latvian catamaran patrol a few hours to NWW. There are almost certainly unadvertized units in the general area as well.
* It is unusual to not see daily sanctioned tanker arrive to Baltic Sea, usually a few each day.
But, the last 4 days lull ismight be explained by weather: Atlantic storms, low temperature and an increasingly frozen Gulf of Finland.
The ice is growing thicc around Russia's Baltic oil terminals.
Ice data outlets list a bunch of ice-breakers in service, but other sources have stated Russia lack capacity to keep the ice-sensitive rust-bucket tankers in play.