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Black Sea tensions as Sea Breeze began
Summary
A look back at the days around 29 June 2021, when a naval confrontation and large-scale exercises shared the same waters.
What did the Black Sea look like on 29 June 2021? It was a stretch of water where a diplomatic quarrel and a major exercise overlapped.
On 28 June 2021, the Sea Breeze military exercises began in the Black Sea. They were described as the largest in the history of the exercises. The start came only days after a tense encounter involving the British Royal Navy.
The HMS Defender incident
On 23 June 2021, Russia's Defence Ministry said a Russian Navy patrol ship had fired shots and a Su-24 attack aircraft had dropped bombs in the path of the destroyer HMS Defender. Moscow said the ship had entered Russian-claimed territorial waters near Crimea.
The UK Ministry of Defence rejected that account. It said the Russian activity was part of a military exercise in the area and denied that any shots or bombs had been directed at the British ship.
On 24 June 2021, Russia warned that it would bomb British vessels if the Royal Navy took any further provocative action in the Black Sea. Russia had earlier summoned the British ambassador over the incident. London said the vessel had been in Ukrainian waters, that using the route was entirely right, and that the Royal Navy would always uphold international law and would not accept unlawful interference with innocent passage.
What the overlap meant
The two accounts of the same event were incompatible: one placed the ship in Russian-claimed waters, the other in Ukrainian waters. Russia's threat of 24 June 2021 and the start of the largest Sea Breeze exercises on 28 June 2021 meant the sea was crowded with military activity and sharp rhetoric as the month ended.
For readers following Ukraine and its neighbours, the episode showed how closely the legal status of waters around Crimea was tied to day-to-day naval movements.
