Mark Galeotti Mark Galeotti

The real reason Putin targeted HMS Defender

HMS Defender (Getty images)

When military personnel talk of ‘theatres’ they mean a zone of conflict. Moscow seems to take the term increasingly literally, though, regarding spin as an essential tool of martial statecraft.

This was especially visible in yesterday’s claims that its Border Guard ships fired warning shots and Black Sea Fleet Su-24 bombers dropped OFAB-250 fragmentation bombs because the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender ‘intruded’ onto Russia’s ‘territorial waters.’ After which, Moscow smugly noted, Defender ‘left’ those waters.

Except that very little of that seems to be true. First of all, the waters in question were off Cape Fiolent, at the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula. By international law, the waters off Crimea are certainly not Russian, because its annexation has no international standing. (Even Belarus’s Lukashenko, who is now so dependent on Moscow, hasn’t recognised it.)

This was a conflict of posture and propaganda

Defender’s mission was in part a so-called FONOP, a Freedom of Navigation Operation, intended to signal that Russia’s land- (and sea-) grab was not going to be recognised. After all, military forces are also political instruments. The deployment of the HMS Queen Elizabeth carrier strike group, from which Defender had briefly split to carry out its Black Sea mission was explicitly framed by Defence Secretary Ben Wallace as ‘projecting our influence [and] signalling our power.’

Defender was also signalling continued support for Kyiv, doubly important at a time when Ukraine’s bid for Nato membership is still in limbo, as well as Britain’s role as a guarantor of the international order.

So this was a conflict of posture and propaganda. When the deployment started, I wrote for the Council on Geostrategy that:

‘Presuming that HMS Defender does more than poke its prow into the Black Sea, a Russian response which combines heightened rhetoric with perhaps some military theatrics, from low passes by Russian jets to close encounters with ships, can be expected.

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