Putin Reacts To Provocation With British Destroyer Off Crimea

The incident with the British guided missile destroyer Defender off Crimea was a clear provocation, Vladimir Putin said during his annual Q&A session on Wednesday.

This is, of course, a provocation, which is absolutely clear. What did these provocateurs want to show and what goals did they seek to achieve? First of all, it [the provocation] was comprehensive and was staged not only by the British but also by the Americans because the British warship ventured into our territorial waters in the afternoon while early in the morning, at 07:30, a US strategic reconnaissance plane took off from a NATO airfield in Greece, from Crete, I believe. I later received a report on that. We saw and observed it clearly,' Putin said.

The British destroyer's intrusion into Russia's territorial waters in the Black Sea pursued reconnaissance aims, Russian President Vladimir Putin said. "It was obvious that the destroyer intruded in pursuit of military aims, trying to find out with the help of a reconnaissance plane what our armed forces' countermeasures to this sort of provocations might be, to see what facilities are activated, where they are located and how they work.

Russia’s Defense Ministry reported on June 23 that the Black Sea Fleet jointly with the border guards of the Federal Security Service (FSB) halted a violation of the state border by the UK Navy’s guided missile destroyer Defender off Crimea’s Fiolent Cape.

The British warship ventured three kilometers into the Russian territorial waters. A Russian guard ship fired warning shots while a Su-24M bomber dropped bombs in the UK warship’s path to chase it out of Crimean waters.

The Russian Defense Ministry slammed the UK destroyer’s operations as a gross violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and urged the British side to investigate the warship crew’s actions.