OSINT-Versus-Fiction: Jack Ryan's Ship Identified
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is now in series 3 on Amazon Prime. In this Season Jack races against time and across Europe to stop a rogue faction within the Russian government from restoring the Soviet Empire and starting World War III. Presumably 'rogue faction' means it's not the President doing this in the fictional version.
Twitter user @legitloginname noticed that the show used satellite imagery of Sevastopol in one of its episodes. It is supposed to show a cargo ship. Of course, many in the defense and OSINT communities will instantly recognize which class of ship it actually is.
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I do not want to ruin the plot or your enjoyment of the show, but the following unmasking of the 'cargo ship' as a Russian Navy warship is obligatory.
The imagery used just happens to be available on Google Earth Pro. It is a Maxar image from March 13 2020. Therefore identifying the ships is relatively straightforward. (Actually I ID’d them from a screenshot of the show before I thought to check GE. Muppet, we live and learn!). Back in 2020 Russia’s Black Sea Fleet still had a KARA Class cruiser and KASHIN class destroyer moored in Sevastopol. These curious Cold War hangovers are visible on the imagery.
The KARA has since been scrapped and the KASHIN has been moved to become a museum. The SLAVA Class cruiser Moskva, then the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, is also just visible on the edge of the screenshot. That ship has since bneen sunk by Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles on April 13-14 this year.
Using this method we can say with confidence that the ship highlighted in the show is a Buyan-M missile corvette.
The Buyan-M shown will be one of the ships now launching Kalibr cruise missiles at Ukraine. Maybe Jack Ryan knew something we didn't back in 2020?
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