Home › Security › Black Sea tensions as Sea Breeze exercise began
Black Sea tensions as Sea Breeze exercise began
Summary
A look back at the Black Sea on 29 June 2021, as a large naval exercise followed a dispute between Moscow and London.
What was happening in the Black Sea on 29 June 2021? Two strands ran side by side: a confrontation between Russia and the United Kingdom, and the start of a major multinational exercise.
On 28 June 2021, the Sea Breeze military exercise began in the Black Sea. It was described as the largest in the exercise's history.
The backdrop was a dispute that had unfolded days earlier. On 23 June, 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 HMS Defender. Moscow said the ship had entered Russian-claimed territorial waters near Crimea. The UK Ministry of Defence rejected that account, saying the Russian activity was part of a military exercise in the area and denying that shots or bombs had been directed at the ship.
By 24 June, the rhetoric had hardened. Russia warned that it would bomb British vessels if the Royal Navy took any further provocative action in the Black Sea. It had earlier summoned the British ambassador over the incident. London's position was that the vessel was in Ukrainian waters, that using the route was entirely right, and that the Royal Navy would uphold international law and not accept unlawful interference with innocent passage.
What the sequence showed
The two accounts of the same stretch of water were irreconcilable: Russia treated the waters near Crimea as its own, while the UK treated them as Ukrainian. Against that dispute, the opening of Sea Breeze on 28 June placed a record-scale exercise in the same sea within days of the warnings.
