Podcast: Code Name: The Shadow War in the Mediterranean

On the night of 14–15 September 2026, three ships docked at the port of Tobruk in Eastern Libya: they are the cargo ship Anastasiia, the Yuri Arshenevskyi and the amphibious assault ship Aleksandr Shabalin. All three are Russian military vessels, and had set sail about a month earlier from the Russian naval base at Baltyisk, in Kaliningrad, Moscow’s exclave situated within Polish territory.

The intelligence services of various countries, including Italia, are monitoring the landing very closely, for at least three reasons: the first is that this is the second convoy of Russian ships of this type in the Mediterranean within the space of a few weeks; the second is that Tobruk is the stronghold of General Khalifa Haftar, the strongman of Cyrenaica, which constitutes Moscow’s most important military asset. And then there is a third reason: the Russian military convoy is not carrying just any cargo. Photographs analysed by various experts in OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) identify the cargo as convoys of Ural logistics lorries, armoured personnel carriers and military vehicles designed to counter mines and ambushes. In essence, Russia is transporting heavy military equipment to the other side of the Mediterranean.

In this new episode of “Code Name”, Claudio Antonelli and Antonio Talia interview industry experts to investigate what Moscow’s interests and ambitions are in the Mediterranean basin and how it is positioning itself to pursue its objectives. The guests are Daniele Ruvinetti, a geopolitical analyst and senior adviser at the Med Or Foundation, an organisation established in 2021 on the initiative of Leonardo with the aim of promoting cultural, research and scientific training activities to strengthen international relations between Italia and countries in the Mediterranean, the Middle and Far East, and South America, and engineer Elisa Villata, Head of Growth at StarView, a digital service that uses satellite and aerial imagery to help client companies in the insurance and government sectors tackle the challenge of disaster assessment by utilising artificial intelligence to streamline the process.

These are days when it seems as though the Mediterranean has been rediscovered on the map. As recently as 24 September, an article in El Mundo, a major Spanish national newspaper, had sent the Foreign and Defence ministers of half of Europe into a frenzy. The newspaper claimed to have a scoop, based on a source close to the Lithuanian secret services; the report alleged that the CIA had raised the alarm about possible attacks by Russian drones targeting France, Spain and Italia. The report was denied within a matter of hours, but that was enough to rekindle interests – and fears – that had been forgotten. The Mediterranean is at the centre of many tensions: on the other side of the sea lies not nothingness, but the southern flank of NATO and the European Union, which is coveted by many powers, first and foremost Russia. Ever since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, Moscow has turned Libya into its bridgehead for access to the Sahel, where the Afrika Korps (the former Wagner Brigades) hold sway across Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. Ostensibly deployed on a mission to combat terrorism, in reality they are draining resources from those countries.

Listen to the episode