Russia fires warning shots at British destroyer in the Black Sea

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Grey Havoc

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www.bbc.com

HMS Defender: Russian jets and ships shadow British warship

More than 20 jets and two coastguard ships shadow HMS Defender as it sails near Crimea's coast.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

A Russian patrol ship and fighter jet fired warning shots towards a British destroyer in the Black Sea, reports in Russia say.
Moscow's defence ministry said that HMS Defender entered Russian territorial waters near Crimea.
The UK's Ministry of Defence has not yet commented.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 but this has not been recognised internationally.
Russia said the incident happened near Cape Fiolent in the south of Crimea and claimed the British vessel subsequently changed course.
A patrol ship fired twice and the Su24-M jet dropped four bombs in its path, the Russian reports say.

The British embassy's defence attaché has been summoned to the Russian defence ministry, Interfax news agency reported.
HMS Defender is a Type 45 destroyer that is part of the UK's Carrier Strike Group. It is carrying out missions in the Black Sea, according to the Royal Navy's website.
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Article update:
Britain has denied Russian reports that its military fired warning shots at a UK destroyer in the Black Sea.
Moscow's defence ministry was quoted as saying that HMS Defender entered Russian territorial waters near Crimea while a patrol ship fired warning shots and a jet dropped bombs in its path.
But the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) said "no warning shots have been fired at HMS Defender".
It added that the ship was sailing in Ukrainian waters.
"The Royal Navy ship is conducting innocent passage through Ukrainian territorial waters in accordance with international law," the MoD said.
The MoD said the Russians were carrying out a gunnery exercise in the Black Sea and provided prior warning of their activity.

"No shots were directed at HMS Defender and we do not recognise the claim that bombs were dropped in her path," it added.
Click to expand...
 
www.reuters.com

Russia says British destroyer violated maritime law - Interfax

Russia's defence ministry said on Wednesday that the British Navy destroyer Defender violated a United Nations convention on maritime law by trespassing into Russian waters, Interfax news agency reported.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

www.reuters.com

Ukraine says Russian shots at British ship show 'aggressive' Russian policy

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Wednesday that Russia's firing of warning shots at a British ship showed Russia's aggressive and provocative policy that constituted a threat to Ukraine and its allies.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
 
...they had a bbc journalist on the destroyer. I know Russia is a corrupt dictatorship but can we please stop pretending that the western powers arent corrupt beyond belief and in bed with MSM/big business? Dumb political theatre by corrupt governments waging propaganda wars on their respective populations.
 
Nothing wrong with a Freedom of Navigation exercise and a port call or two in the Black Sea. Hardly the first such endeavour and it won't be the last, despite Russian catawailing. The Russians frequently sniff around the English Channel and Faslane so the hypocrisy is strong with this one.
 
Pure political theatre.
If you're going to make a point and do freedom of navigation exercises then why bother denying anything happened when you get the reaction you hoped you would? Especially when you went to all the trouble of putting BBC and newspaper journalists aboard to record the fun.

And of course the Russians would over egg the reports, though they have conducted aggressive aerial buzzing of other NATO ships in the Baltic for example. And yes its it hypocrisy, no doubt in a day or two a Bear will stray a little closer to UK airspace to make the point.
 
Political theatre, yes but hardly purely so. Good training and some useful ELINT to be had too. On both sides!
 
Rhinocrates said:
Paywalled, but you get the gist...

www.newscientist.com

GPS cyberattack falsely placed UK warship near Russian naval base

An international vessel-tracking system appears to show UK destroyer HMS Defender travel to within a few kilometres of a Russian naval base even though a web cam feed shows it was docked at Odessa, Ukraine
www.newscientist.com www.newscientist.com
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As an addendum, this is not the first report I've seen of someone playing silly buggers with GPS. Sorry, I can't find a link right now. Also, just off the top of my head, I think that I've read that celestial navigation for a wide variety of applications might well make a comeback. You can't hack the stars as far as I know.

The lesson here is that if you depend on it, someone will seek to use it against you.
 
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Rhinocrates said:
Rhinocrates said:
Paywalled, but you get the gist...

www.newscientist.com

GPS cyberattack falsely placed UK warship near Russian naval base

An international vessel-tracking system appears to show UK destroyer HMS Defender travel to within a few kilometres of a Russian naval base even though a web cam feed shows it was docked at Odessa, Ukraine
www.newscientist.com www.newscientist.com
Click to expand...
As an addendum, this is not the first report I've seen of someone playing silly buggers with GPS. Sorry, I can't find a link right now. Also, just off the top of my head, I think that I've read that celestial navigation for a wide variety of applications might well make a comeback. You can't hack the stars as far as I know.

The lesson here is that if you depend on it, someone will seek to use it against you.
Click to expand...

How many miles this ship again from the shore ?

This kind of interesting case. Ground based jamming would need kind of tall antenna and it would be kind of sight. Airborne jammer might be a good suspect. But dont military grade GPS receiver will usually have multi-channel design which also take account of ECM's ? and to my knowledge, warship will usually have some form of Inertial Guidance (gyros etc).
 
stealthflanker said:
Rhinocrates said:
Rhinocrates said:
Paywalled, but you get the gist...

www.newscientist.com

GPS cyberattack falsely placed UK warship near Russian naval base

An international vessel-tracking system appears to show UK destroyer HMS Defender travel to within a few kilometres of a Russian naval base even though a web cam feed shows it was docked at Odessa, Ukraine
www.newscientist.com www.newscientist.com
Click to expand...
As an addendum, this is not the first report I've seen of someone playing silly buggers with GPS. Sorry, I can't find a link right now. Also, just off the top of my head, I think that I've read that celestial navigation for a wide variety of applications might well make a comeback. You can't hack the stars as far as I know.

The lesson here is that if you depend on it, someone will seek to use it against you.
Click to expand...

How many miles this ship again from the shore ?

This kind of interesting case. Ground based jamming would need kind of tall antenna and it would be kind of sight. Airborne jammer might be a good suspect. But dont military grade GPS receiver will usually have multi-channel design which also take account of ECM's ? and to my knowledge, warship will usually have some form of Inertial Guidance (gyros etc).
Click to expand...

To be clear, this is not an attack on GPS to confuse the ship about its own location. It's someone inserting false data into a public AIS feed (a vessel tracking service) to mislead observers about the movements of the ship.

news.usni.org

Positions of Two NATO Ships Were Falsified Near Russian Black Sea Naval Base - USNI News

The tracking data of two NATO warships was faked off the coast of a Russian controlled naval base in the Black Sea while the actual ships were moored 180 miles away, USNI News has learned. The U.K. Royal Navy’s HMS Defender, a Type-45 Daring-class destroyer, and the Royal Netherlands Navy’s...
news.usni.org news.usni.org

There absolutely have been actually GPS spoofing attacks, but this is not one of them. This is more likely a propaganda effort so the Russians can show some "independent" source that allegedly proves the NATO vessels violated Russian (legally still Ukrainian) territorial waters.
 
tass.com

Russia's use of weapons in maritime incident off Crimea was justified — lawyer

Russia's Black Sea Fleet and the FSB's border guard service on Wednesday stopped a violation of Russia's state border by the British destroyer HMS Defender off Cape Fiolent
tass.com tass.com

tass.com

Russia's reaction to provocation by British destroyer reasonable, proportionate — senator

On Wednesday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that the Black Sea Fleet and the FSB's Border Guard Service stopped a violation of the Russian state border by the British destroyer HMS Defender off Cape Fiolent
tass.com tass.com
 
First acknowledged use of live ordnance against an intruding NATO vessel since the end of the Cold War. Not a good omen.
 
As far as I can tell, a UK ship floated somewhere near Russian ships that were firing, either as an exercise or as a very distant warning shot, and the Russians faked the AIS positional information to make it look like they were operating in *Ukrainian* waters, while also claiming they fired warning shops and dropped bombs, the former of which was disputed not only by the RN but by a reporter embedded with the ship, the latter of which seems to have been a complete fabrication. To me this is just a lot of Russian chest thumping and needling because they don't appreciate NATO warships in their back yard. They routinely have buzzed USN destroyers in the same body of water; this doesn't seem especially different from those incidents. Compared to Soviets ships ramming US vessels during the cold war, this doesn't seem like cause for excessive concern.
 
Grey Havoc said:
First acknowledged use of live ordnance against an intruding NATO vessel since the end of the Cold War. Not a good omen.
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I read this as almost entirely for internal consumption. It seems to be designed to look very aggressive to people reading Russian media. But whatever actually occurred was carefully constructed to not pose any real threat of escalation by the NATO forces involved.
 
Even if we did station Defender 2 miles off Sebastopol it would still legally be in Ukrainian territorial waters!

The whole point of the effort was to annoy the Russians, but it seems to have been even more effective than expected. There was clearly an effort by the Russians to get ahead of the story, but reporting they'd dropped bombs in front of a ship carrying multiple reporters who could confirm they hadn't just invites the kind of ridicule we used to direct at Russian PR 20 years ago (cf Kursk and claims they were in contact with the crew).

Which is not to say there weren't other factors in play, such as the UK deal to build six missile boats for Ukraine.
 
And for anyone who isn't aware of what AIS is, think transponders for ships. AIS broadcasts position and ID of any fitted ships (civilian ships must broadcast, warships can turn it off). And like any other transponder it can be spoofed by reporting false data, or in this case apparently by sending false data to the sites that display AIS data on the web.

As AIS is an international maritime safety system, the problems of Russia messing with it are a bit more serious than they look on the surface.
 
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AIS is an open civilian system that was never designed to be secure, it was designed to be easily implemented and accessible. Compared to GPS spoofing that the Russians are capable of as well, this was an simple hack.
 
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The scoundrels and provocateurs were given to understand that next time they would receive a torpedo / missile or a capture group. Choose one
 
The UK government has already gone on the record as saying transits will be repeated. However the Defender itself I think is scheduled to leave the area and join the QE CV group deployment to the Pacific, so it is perhaps something the next RN patrol will partake in.
 
DWG said:
Even if we did station Defender 2 miles off Sebastopol it would still legally be in Ukrainian territorial waters!
Click to expand...
Do we really want to get in this argument though?

Are British F-35s "legally" in Syrian airspace?
 
Josh_TN said:
As far as I can tell, a UK ship floated somewhere near Russian ships that were firing, either as an exercise or as a very distant warning shot, and the Russians faked the AIS positional information to make it look like they were operating in *Ukrainian* waters, while also claiming they fired warning shops and dropped bombs, the former of which was disputed not only by the RN but by a reporter embedded with the ship, the latter of which seems to have been a complete fabrication. To me this is just a lot of Russian chest thumping and needling because they don't appreciate NATO warships in their back yard. They routinely have buzzed USN destroyers in the same body of water; this doesn't seem especially different from those incidents. Compared to Soviets ships ramming US vessels during the cold war, this doesn't seem like cause for excessive concern.
Click to expand...

Defender did enter Crimean waters (which everyone other than Russia still considers Ukrainian), even the UK MoD statement obliquely acknowledges that and it was fully intentional. The AIS spoof however is a separate incident that preceded this confrontation by several days, when the ships affected (including Defender) were still moored in a Ukrainian port. Similarly, the Russian naval exercise is separate though possibly related - they might have been suspecting the RN would make such a move and hoped conducting shooting practice in the area would deter it.

While it appears that no bombs were dropped, the warning shots were definitely real (there is video), but the Russians fired them from a considerable distance so as to avoid misconstruction. Unfortunately, this seems to have left them open to another misunderstanding (or intentional misrepresentation, YMMV): denial that they ever happened in the first place. For what it's worth, even the reporter on board does report hearing shots, but did not add any interpretation on their intent (ongoing exercise or warnings).

As Hood has pointed out, the UK handling of the PR around the incident has not been particularly skillful. By only indirectly acknowledging that the ship entered Crimean waters and denying the warning shots it put itself in the position of contradicting its own press. This hurts its credibility unnecessarily, making the Russian version of the events appear more accurate (save for the imaginary bombs, they told it like it was). Also, it's liable to be taken as an invitation by the Russians to make the warning shots more compelling next time round... not sure that's a desirable outcome either.
 
Glad embedded state run media journalists on the destroyer were there to tell us the real truth!
 
I'm sure being called scoundrels and provocateurs is probably the worst wound that the Royal Navy has ever received! I'm heartened that Russians are so concerned for the territorial integrity of their Ukrainian brothers' waters . ;) Glasnost indeed!

Seriously though comrades, if Defender's actions are provocative, what would you call Admiral Kasatonov's recent activities? What about the Ropucha-class in the English Channel? What could you use a Ropucha-class for?? I'm genuinely curious. Might provocative be an appropriate word to use in such circumstances? Is "a dagger flashed" hyperbole? We have a saying in my part of the world. It starts: sauce for the goose....

So now, should I expect a bot zerg rush on my IP address or should I use thick gloves when opening my front door? Sing it with me. It's a long waay to Salis-bury.....
 
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Trident said:
As Hood has pointed out, the UK handling of the PR around the incident has not been particularly skillful.
Click to expand...
To be fair, government PR is not skilful at the best of times (apologising for breaking social distancing rules is probably the lamest excuse for a politician having an affair on the job in British political history).

There is no doubt that several things are connected here, first the Royal Navy is announcing it's back in the carrier strike business with HMS Queen Elizabeth's F-35s now part of Operation Shader (resulting in the MiG-31K deployment to Syria) and the 'Doomsday Sub' Belgorod has begun her sea trials (doubtless there is an RN or USN SSN snooping up there to give her the once over).

So for Russia, seeing Britain flex its naval power in the Indian Ocean/Syria and the Black Sea (and possibly in the Arctic too), is a rapid change from recent years and a reaction was inevitable.
 
Ouch.
 
TR1 said:
Are British F-35s "legally" in Syrian airspace?
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See UNSC Resolution 2249, unanimously adopted by the Security Council, including Russia:

"5. Calls upon Member States that have the capacity to do so to take all necessary measures, in compliance with international law, in particular with the United Nations Charter, as well as international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law, on the territory under the control of ISIL also known as Da’esh, in Syria and Iraq, to redouble and coordinate their efforts to prevent and suppress terrorist acts committed specifically by ISIL also known as Da’esh as well as ANF, and all other individuals, groups, undertakings, and entities associated with Al-Qaida, and other terrorist groups, as designated by the United Nations Security Council, and as may further be agreed by the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) and endorsed by the UN Security Council, pursuant to the statement of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) of 14 November, and to eradicate the safe haven they have established over significant parts of Iraq and Syria;"

"VITALY CHURKIN (Russian Federation) said, “we are all outraged over attacks in Sinai and Paris”, as well as in Turkey, Tunisia, Lebanon and Mali. Unequivocally condemning all terrorist acts, he said the masterminds would be punished. The Government of the Russian Federation sought broad cooperation with other States to that end. “We had to support the French resolution,” he said, noting that despite a tight time frame, France’s delegation had taken his country’s amendments on board. The United Nations Charter should be the foundation of anti-terrorism efforts, a reference now included in the text. Emphasizing that the statement by the International Syria Support Group, alongside the Geneva communiqué, should be used to settle the crisis in Syria, he said, describing today’s unanimous vote as a step towards the creation of a broad anti-terrorism front aimed at eradicating root causes. That was also the aim of a Russian draft presented to the Council on 30 September, and attempts by some to block such efforts were politically short-sighted, he added."
 
https://tass.com/defense/1307321 As long as there isn't WW3 were good.

MOSCOW, June 25. /TASS/. Russia’s Defense Ministry has called on the Pentagon and the command of the British naval forces "to be guided by reason" when dispatching their warships to the Black Sea, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Igor Konashenkov said on Friday.
READ ALSO
Russian naval ships, aircraft kick off drills in Mediterranean

"We call on the Pentagon and the command of the British naval forces, who send their warships to the Black Sea, not to push their luck pandering to the Ukrainian ‘mosquito fleet admirals’ but to be guided by reason instead," he said.
According to Konashenkov, former Rear Admiral John Kirby, who called the Black Sea incident disinformation, "is fully aware that the Defender destroyer in any part of the Black Sea is a target for the anti-ship systems of the Black Sea Fleet safeguarding Crimea’s security".
The ministry’s spokesman stressed that the Pentagon fitfully denied the obvious even after Russia released a video of the warning shots being fired and direct testimony of the destroyer’s crew. "The epic fiasco of the provocation of the British destroyer Defender in the Black Sea, which abruptly changed course from Russian territorial waters after warning shots from a patrol ship, will long remain a colorful stain on the reputation of the Royal Navy," he said.

On Wednesday, the Russian defense ministry said that the Black Sea Fleet and the Federal Security Service (FSB) border guard service thwarted a violation of the Russian border by HMS Defender off Crimea’s Cape Fiolent. The destroyer reportedly traveled three kilometers into Russia’s territorial waters. A coastal guard ship fired warning shots, followed by several bombs dropped from a Su-24M plane ahead of the Defender, after which the destroyer left Russia’s territorial waters. The Russian defense ministry described the destroyer’s actions as a blatant violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and called on London to investigate the actions of the crew.​

The British side claims that the destroyer was conducting "innocent passage through Ukrainian territorial waters". According to London, the Russian military did not fire any shots at the destroyer, but conducted "practice firing".
On Thursday, Russia’s FSB released video footage showing warning shots fired in the direction of the British destroyer in the Black Sea. The footage shows that the Russian border guards repeatedly warned the HMS Defender that they would open fire if the destroyer crossed the Russian border, after which warning shots were fired.
 
sideshowbob9 said:
So now, should I expect a bot zerg rush on my IP address or should I use thick gloves when opening my front door? Sing it with me. It's a long waay to Salis-bury.....
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First, think with your own head, otherwise Johnson's shaggy head will lead you to war. On May 1, 1990, I personally observed the provocative actions of the frigate "Sheffield" from the destroyer "Impeccable"of Project 956. He didn't have the audacity to cross the border then. So leave your Anglo-Saxon propaganda with the British. They believe everything they see on TV


EhyDd5pXcAIH6yl.jpg

 
paralay said:
The scoundrels and provocateurs were given to understand that next time they would receive a torpedo / missile or a capture group. Choose one
Click to expand...
Would be interesting to see if Aster could take down Kinzhal.
 
Dear members,

time to start considering moderating this thread.

Please avoid:
political threads that are far from the forum's main subject.
sterile posts deviating from main focus, raising confrontation between members, filling the forum with clutter posts...
remember secret projects foundating purpouse is to be a reference encyclopedia about unbuilt / little known military (as well as some related civilian) technology.

A place for collaboration.

Thanks for your attention.
 
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The latest patch did these bots no favours whatsoever....

Answer the question. Is a deployment of multiple Russian warships into the English Channel provocative or not? If not, why not?

I need no-one tell me whether an actual NBC attack on British soil is provocation however! No doubt the novichok fell off a lorry and Putin sent the GRU in to save us. Propaganda? Hav' a clue.
 
Realistically deploying a T45 to the Black Sea is not going to be a regular event. Of the 6 in service, most seem to be undergoing maintenance.
That leaves the remaining overworked and ageing T23s. Again, not available for such Summer outings very often.
The feminist expression "Willy waving" comes to mind.
The scene in "Tomorrow never dies" where M makes a similar point to Admiral Roebuck should be compulsory for our Harry Potter generation politicians.
 
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