On 15 September, it was revealed that three Russian ships had offloaded their military cargo the day before at the port of Tubruq in eastern Libya.
The ships – the cargo ships Anastasiia and Yuriy Arshenevskiy and the landing ship Aleksandr Shabalin – had left Baltiysk Naval Base, Kaliningrad, Russia, in mid-August, passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and crossed the Mediterranean with their transponders (Automatic Identification System (AIS)) switched off. South of Sicily, they were picked up and monitored by Italian Air Force maritime patrol aircraft on 10 September.
The offloaded military equipment included about 50 Tornado-U trucks, 30 MRAP (probably Ural Typhoon), and 10 APCs (probably BTR-82). After the cargo had been offloaded, the vehicles left the port in a convoy, heading west.
There was no information about the ships, their cargo, or its destination from Russia, nor the Libyan National Army (LNA), nor eastern Libyan authorities.