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Black Sea tensions as Sea Breeze began
Summary
A look back at how a naval exercise opened amid a dispute over HMS Defender and Russian warnings to London.
What did the Black Sea look like on 29 June 2021, the day after the Sea Breeze military exercise began there? Reports from 28 June described it as the largest in the exercise's history, and it opened only days after a confrontation involving a British warship.
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 vessel had entered Russian-claimed territorial waters near Crimea. The UK Ministry of Defence rejected that account, said a Russian military exercise was under way nearby, and denied that any shots or bombs had been directed at the ship.
Warnings and counter-claims
On 24 June, Russia warned the United Kingdom 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's position, as stated that day, was that the vessel had been in Ukrainian waters and that it was entirely right to use the route. It added that the Royal Navy would always uphold international law and would not accept unlawful interference with innocent passage.
What the juxtaposition meant
The sequence is plain from the dates. A disputed encounter on 23 June, a threat the next day, and the start of a large-scale exercise on 28 June. The two sides offered incompatible accounts of where the destroyer was and what had been fired or dropped near it. Those competing claims were still unresolved when the exercise began.
For readers in Kyiv and elsewhere in the region, the key point is that the argument was about whose waters the ship was in. The UK said Ukrainian waters; Russia said Russian-claimed waters near Crimea.
