← Baltic Sonar · Methodology & trust

Sources

Every source below is public and carries a credibility class (see methodology). The weight is a starting point by class; it is combined with corroboration across independent editorial groups, so five outlets from one newsroom count as one confirmation, not five. Class D/E/P sources cannot raise the threat level on their own; the classes below are the ones that currently hold at least one registered feed, and a class absent from this page holds none.

Corroborated = share of this source's events that ≥2 independent editorial groups also reported (newsrooms collapsed, aggregators excluded) — the same definition as the Coverage & Confidence panel on the front page, so the two numbers agree. It is low across the board, and that is the honest picture. Auto-attributed = share our classifier marked CONFIRMED / HIGHLY_LIKELY. That is a machine guess about who was behind it, not a confirmation that the event happened, and it is shown in its own column precisely so it is never mistaken for one.

Sensors — primary measurements — marked 'measured', class A

Reference registry — listings, not our measurement

OpenSanctions — Maritime · 23636 rows · version 20261014150330-jrf · refreshed daily · opensanctions.org · licence CC BY-NC 4.0 (not part of our CC BY open data).

This is not a source class of its own. It aggregates listings made by many different bodies, and the credibility belongs to the body that made the listing, not to the aggregator: class A for EU / OFAC / UK / UN designations and port-state-control detentions, class C for research listings (RUSI Project Sandstone) and for the Ukrainian NACP “War & Sanctions” portal. The NACP portal is official, but it is kept by a party to the conflict, so it is marked as such and can never on its own raise our confidence in anything (§5).

What this registry is not: it records listings and detentions, not vessels suspected in incidents, and it has no predictive power. EAGLE S — the vessel whose anchor cut EstLink 2 — is in it (7 rows by IMO). NEWNEW POLAR BEAR and YI PENG 3, both central to earlier Baltic cable incidents, return zero rows. A hull being absent here means nothing, and a hull being present here explains nothing about its behaviour.

The five listing types are kept apart and never collapsed into one “sanctioned” badge: sanctions designation, port-state-control detention (a ship-condition finding, not a security allegation), regulatory warning, shadow-fleet listing, vessel of interest. Merging them would roughly quadruple the apparent picture.

A · Official / primary — governments, CERTs, ministries, NATO, EU, sensors — 27

B · Trusted independent — public broadcasters & major dailies — 25

C · Specialist / OSINT — think-tanks & investigative outlets — 20

Generated 2026-10-15 19:00 UTC · “Awareness is power.”