Russian Destroyer Fires Warning Shot to Scare Off Norwegian Longliner
The crew of a Norwegian fishing vessel had a hair-raising run-in with a Russian warship in the Barents Sea during a massive naval exercise earlier this month. According to the skipper, the Russian vessel approached and fired warning shots to drive them out of the area - even though they were within the Norwegian exclusive economic zone.
In mid-September, Russia launched the "Ocean-24" naval exercise, a mass drill involving more than 400 warships and 120 aircraft. It was the largest Russian exercise of its kind in decades, and it involved elements of China's PLA Navy. In the Pacific Ocean, heightened activity involving the Russian Navy's Pacific Fleet near the Aleutian Islands prompted the U.S. military to reinforce the garrison on Shemya Island.
Russia's Northern Fleet conducts many of its exercises in the Barents Sea, and its operations sometimes overlap with Norwegian fishing interests. The Russian Navy declared a live-fire exercise area in international waters of the Barents Sea for Ocean-24, and on September 12, one Russian destroyer commander decided to enforce the boundaries.
Øystein Orten, co-owner of the 50-foot fishing vessel Ragnhild Kristine, said that he received a call from an unnamed warship as he and his crew were working a line. The message was brief: "'This is Russian warship, you need to leave the area,'" Orten recalled in a conversation with NRK. (From photos Orten provided, the vessel had the pennant number 605, corresponding to the Udaloy-class destroyer Admiral Levchenko.)
Orten responded that there was no question of whether the Ragnhild Kristine would depart. "They didn't have the right to banish us, and we had a line to follow," he said. "Then the warship came at full speed with the cannons towards us."
The warship closed to within 200 meters and fired what appeared to be a warning shot from a cannon. The round landed near the fishing vessel, Orten said; given the circumstances, he reopened negotiations with the warship and agreed to relocate a bit to the west for about six hours.
Luckily, the agreement did not cost him his catch when he came back to pull in the line. "I caught a lot of cod, and some haddock and halibut," he told NRK.
Orten did not blame the Russians - they were trying to keep civilians out of a live-fire zone - but he called Norwegian authorities "cowards" for allowing Russia's navy to exercise in the Norwegian EEZ in the first place. (Under UNCLOS, the EEZ gives Norway sovereign authority over fishing and seabed rights only, and navigation and military activity are outside of its control in international waters.)
Norway's coastal agency said that it had broadcast a safety warning about the Russian exercise area in advance, including the location, and said that it was the responsibility of commercial operators to follow the warning. But even though the drills are preannounced for safety, the exercises are a regular source of friction with Norway's commercial fishermen, who risk losing out on a good catch if they can't access prime fishing areas.
Top image: Admiral Levchenko (Neill Rush / CC BY SA 3.0)
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