The crew isn’t Russian though. Just hired help that don’t care too much what they’re paid to do. Russia doesn’t care about their fate.

Much, much longer than that. But yes, they picked up the pace again in recent years.

That particular one is Taiwanese I believe, and passed several minutes before the outage maintaining a constant pace.

Finnish border guard has stopped a tanker registered to Cook Islands that’s part of the Russian shadow fleet, which slowed down significantly while crossing the cable and was on site when the outage started.