REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK: Hold my vodka: Antarctica’s Russian ghost ship discovers warp drive

After uncovering Antarctic prospecting by Moscow’s Akademik Alexander Karpinsky, Daily Maverick’s probing questions may have prompted a bizarre and lightning-fast escape at 97 knots.

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On Monday, 1 June 2026 at 06.26am Pretoria time, Daily Maverick emailed a list of questions to Rosgeo, the Russian state mineral explorer that owns the Antarctic survey ship Akademik Alexander Karpinsky.

After a three-year investigation published Wednesday, we had flushed out evidence showing the US-sanctioned Karpinsky had hidden its location while looking for oil and gas in Antarctica.

This is the ship that, in February 2020, used Cape Town as a staging ground to announce it had found 70 billion tons (500 billion barrels) of oil and gas in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean, where mineral prospecting is banned.

A little more than six years later, at the Antarctic Treaty’s May 2026 talks in Hiroshima, a Kremlin document made a remarkable admission. Rosgeo’s Karpinsky had led seismic surveys along Antarctica’s most geopolitically sensitive coastline somewhere between October 2024 and April 2025.

China and Russia are now building new stations on these shores. Called the Unclaimed Sector, it is the only region of Antarctica not claimed by any country. And though the Kremlin admits the ship was in Antarctica during the 2024-25 summer, Daily Maverick established that its location on the map never shifted beyond the Baltic region.

We gave Rosgeo an opportunity to respond before publication on Wednesday.

Could it explain concerns that the latest surveys amounted to outlawed prospecting? And could it explain why the ship seemed capable of being in Antarctica and the Baltic at roughly the same time?

Less than 48 hours after Daily Maverick’s questions landed in Rosgeo’s inbox, the Karpinsky suddenly acquired a voyage to its St Petersburg homeport – at “97 knots”.

According to Marine Traffic on Monday, the ship was seemingly in Tallinn since 11 May.

This was itself unusual because the ship is subject to EU Ukraine war sanctions and should not, in theory, have been enjoying an extended stay in an Estonian port.

For nearly 25 days the ship seemed to remain there under the status: “Vessel is Out-of-Range.”

Nevertheless, at 05.45am on 3 June — as though the questions we had sent on 01/06/26, 6.26am were interpreted as some kind of numerical omen — the ghost ship that seemed frozen to Tallinn departed from its mystery location. Abruptly.

What followed may deserve a place in the history of marine engineering.

Accord