Putin’s untrained superyacht crew learnt job from videos

Claims made in a new video, by eSysman Superyachts, say untrained crew members aboard a superyacht linked to Vladimir Putin had to follow instructions on videos.

eSysman says he spoke to someone who worked on the superyacht.

“When it came out of the shipyard, they had to do handover notes for the other crew,” he says in a youtube video.

“When they were on board, they had to make videos of how to launch a tender, and how to hang the fenders. They had to make videos in English of the procedures of how to do things and they said that the person who told them to do that would later add Russian subtitles to the videos so the crew coming on would be able to do what they’re doing.

“It means that if you have to do a step-by-step procedure on a video of how to launch a tender, the person that’s watching it has never launched a tender. If you’re a professional deckhand you know how to launch a tender.

“The people working onboard were not seafaring professionals.”

This underpins the assertion made by imprisoned Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny, that crew members were drawn from Russia’s Federal Protective Service.

Scheherazade had been undergoing repairs in the port of Marina di Carrara since September 2021. In early May 2022, MIN reported activity at the dockside suggested that the crew were preparing to put the yacht to sea, as calls grew for it to be included in the sanctions.

Supporters of Navalny long believed that the vessel belonged to the Russian president. The yacht was the subject of an investigation by the Italian financial police since the end of March 2022 and around this time, as more and more attention was drawn to the vessel, its Russian crew left in the middle of the night, replaced by an all-British team.

The vessel was impounded by Italian authorities on 6 May 2022.

In the video, eSysman visited Marina Di Cararra in Italy, where the $700m Scheherazade linked to the Russian president has been moored for more than six months.

“I can’t imagine these vessels ever sailing again. I can’t imagine many countries in Europe will want to see these anchored off their shores,” eSysman concludes.