A £100m superyacht believed to be owned by Vladimir Putin is fleeing Europe to avoid Ukrainian drone attacks.
The 82m Graceful is traversing the coast of Norway on course to reach the northern Russian port of Murmansk in the coming days, according to maritime intelligence data and satellite imagery analysed by The Telegraph.
It is sailing under the escort of two Russian naval vessels and under the watchful eye of Nato.
The yacht has been pictured sailing with anti-drone nets covering its deck.
It is being shadowed by a heavily armed Russian I-class destroyer, the Severomorsk, as well as a 7,500-ton Russian salvage and patrol ship, the Voevoda, in the latest demonstration of Putin’s growing paranoia.
The convoy is being monitored by Nato, while German and Danish Navy patrol ships shadowed the vessels on their voyage through the Baltic, according to a senior Nato source.
Putin is understood to have taken numerous trips aboard the yacht, including a 2021 voyage in the Black Sea with Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, according to US government filings.
The vessel is equipped with both saltwater and freshwater pools, a helipad, gym, and secure government communications systems.
It was relocated from the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany, to the Russian shipping enclave of Kaliningrad 17 days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Four months later, the US designated the yacht as blocked property under sanctions, forcing the vessel to rename itself the Kosatka, meaning “Killer Whale” in Russian.
The yacht went into hiding until last week when it re-emerged for the first time in four years.
Its automatic identification system broadcast its journey through the Danish Strait before going dark upon entering the North Sea on Monday.
The accompanying Voevoda continued to broadcast its location as it headed northbound past the Norwegian coast. The convoy is understood to be on course past the northern city of Tromsø before final docking in Murmansk.
John Foreman, Britain’s defence attaché to Moscow until 2022, said: “They don’t want to take any chances. Moving it further away from the Ukrainians after they pummelled Kronstadt.”
Just a week ago, Ukrainian long-range drones struck the strategic Russian Kronstadt naval base on Kotlin Island, around 12 miles east of St Petersburg.
The attack in the Gulf of Finland hit one of Moscow’s few modern warships, the RFS Boiky, in a clear demonstration of the Russian navy’s vulnerability far from the battlelines in Ukraine.
Satellite imagery analysed by The Telegraph reveals an unusually bare Kronstadt naval base following the Ukrainian attacks. Images from June last year appear to show at least nine more vessels docked in the port when compared with images of the base on Wednesday.
In November, a similar attack hit the Kremlin’s Gepard-class frigates Tatarstan and Dagestan, along with a number of small missile ships, while sailing in the Caspian Sea, almost 1,000 miles from Ukraine.
With the realisation that Russia’s air defence was unable to prevent recent strikes, Putin is moving his prized assets out of the Baltic and back home to safety.