Home › Opinion › What the HMS Defender standoff off Crimea revealed
What the HMS Defender standoff off Crimea revealed
Summary
A look back at the Black Sea confrontation between Russia and the UK, and the competing accounts of where the destroyer was sailing.
What did the Black Sea incident involving HMS Defender actually show? By 25 June 2021, two days of claims had left Moscow and London describing the same waters in incompatible terms.
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 Royal Navy destroyer. It said the ship had entered Russian-claimed territorial waters near Crimea. The UK Ministry of Defence rejected that account. It denied that any shots or bombs had been directed at the vessel and said a Russian military exercise was under way nearby.
The dispute then escalated. Russia had already summoned the British ambassador over the incident. On 24 June 2021 it warned that it would bomb British vessels if the Royal Navy took any further provocative action in the Black Sea.
Two readings of one route
The disagreement turns on legal geography. The UK said the vessel was in Ukrainian waters, that it was entirely right to use the route, and that the Royal Navy would always uphold international law. It added that it would not accept unlawful interference with innocent passage. Russia treated the same waters as its own.
The contrast is the point. One side described a routine passage and a nearby exercise; the other described warning fire and bombs. Neither version was reconciled in the public statements of those days, and the threat of 24 June moved the exchange from a dispute over an event to a warning about the future.
For Kyiv, the argument was about the status of waters off Crimea, which the UK placed within Ukraine's jurisdiction.
