SerpApi.Org
On Monday the Russian frigate Neustrashimy conducted a live gunnery firing about 40 nautical miles south of Plymouth, having first advised HMS Tyne, the Royal Navy patrol vessel shadowing her, to keep clear. Three things need to be understood about this at once. It was allowable, it was not safe, and it was clear signalling.
Allowable first. This happened in international waters, and warships are permitted to conduct exercises anywhere outside the 12-mile limit, including live firings, provided they show due regard for others. We do the same in other international waters all the time. Advising Tyne of the firing and asking her to stand off was correct procedure, and to be fair to the Russians, good practice.
Legal is not the same as safe. Firing any calibre of weapon in that part of the world safely is hard work, doubly so when it is your main gun – a 100mm piece in the case of the Neustrashimy. The Channel approaches are among the busiest waters in the world, full of merchant traffic, fishing vessels, yachts and aircraft overhead.
It can be done, but only if your surface and air safety procedures are properly in place. We would issue safety notices to both mariners and aviation authorities beforehand, broadcast on various radio channels prior to firing and then put an extraordinary array of safety traces all over the chart and radar plot either side of the shell’s trajectory and around the planned point of impact.
Then the round may ricochet – bounce off the sea like a spinning stone. This is generally in the direction of the rifling, but it could be random and the shell might reach nearly the maximum range of the gun. In other words, you have no idea where a ricochet will end up. So we would overlay another huge safety trace to allow for that too. Any vessel or aircraft entering any of these traces would mean an immediate ceasefire.
There is no doubt that many of our safety traces had become excessive over the years, but those were the rules and when operating somewhere as busy as that, it pays to adhere to them. Conducting gunnery training also seemed to act like a magnet to yachties (who are generally oblivious) and fishing vessels (who one could swear were heading there deliberately).
In crowded waters like the ones we’re talking about you have to work very hard to get any rounds away at all. I can say with a high degree of confidence that the Neustrashimy didn’t do any of this and there could easily have been a disaster.
Russian firings off the South Coast are very rare and apart from the safety implications, not a huge deal on its own. But this is clearly now part of a wider pattern, and this is the real issue. The Neustrashimy is not passing through; she relieved the Admiral Grigorovich on what appears to be a new standing task for the Russian navy – Channel Guardship – loitering in and around the Channel for months, riding shotgun on the dark fleet tankers that fund the war in Ukraine.
Add the panicky warning shots the Grigorovich fired near a yacht in June, the first boarding of a shadow fleet tanker, and a 30 per cent rise in Russian naval activity around our waters in two years, and Monday stops looking like an isolated bit of training and starts looking like what it is: a deliberate, incremental testing of what we will tolerate. Each action is individually explainable and allowable – but collectively unmistakable.
The timing removes any doubt. I have joked that it was nice of them to give our new Prime Minister a gun salute on his first day in office. The Kremlin’s spokesman even helpfully linked the exercise to Mr Burnham’s support for Kyiv, in case anyone in Whitehall was minded to join the dots in their public reaction to this. No one seems to have been.
Ironically, the timing may prove useful. We have a new PM, a new Defence Secretary and a new Chancellor, all of whom must shortly wrestle with defence expenditure and all of whom have just been given a live demonstration, within sight of our own coast, of why the pressure on that budget is not going away.
If Defence is ever to become votable and therefore properly resourced, people need to believe in the threat. This sort of thing, when added to the hundreds of other hybrid activities, daily hacks, drone incursions, cable cutting, spy ships lasing RAF aircraft and even poisonings, might just help.
This isn’t about tanks rolling off Russian landing ships up our beaches. This is about being strong enough to deter this kind of sub-threshold activity. It’s about creating a safer world in which our ship shadowing a powerful Russian frigate in the Channel would not be an almost unarmed constabulary gunboat like HMS Tyne.
We should have had a real warship there, one which substantially outgunned the Neustrashimy (sadly we don’t have any of those: even our small handful of serviceable frigates and destroyers mostly have no anti-ship missiles). Our aircraft should be more numerous, and armed with weapons that could penetrate the Neustrashimy’s defences (currently they are not).
But the money that should be paying for these things is being spent on brand-new Motability Volvos, other benefits that make it hard to see why anyone would ever work for ordinary wages, huge council and Civil Service pensions – and of course on interest payments on the massive government debt run up by irresponsible Chancellors of the past.
The welfare party is going to have to end or at least be reined in. For we are now in the same position as the neglected Royal Navy of 1667, whose ships were mostly laid up without crews and whose remaining sailors had long gone unpaid. The Dutch were able to sail up the Thames into the un-defended naval bases of the Medway and inflict one of the most humiliating defeats we have ever suffered. Rudyard Kipling later wrote these lines about the Medway raid:
If wars were won by feasting,
Or victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound,
How England would be strong!
But honour and dominion
Are not maintained so.
They’re only got by sword and shot,
And this the Dutchmen know!
The moneys that should feed us
You spend on your delight,
How can you then have sailor-men
To aid you in your fight? …
Mere powder, guns, and bullets,
We scarce can get at all;
Their price was spent in merriment
And revel at Whitehall …
For now, De Ruyter’s topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet–
And this the Dutchmen know!
If the sound of Russian guns off naked Plymouth this week doesn’t wake us up as a nation, we can look forward to the same kind of national humiliation that De Ruyter inflicted on us in the 17th century. And that’s just for starters.
