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Experts: British HMS Defender Stunt Near Crimea Was Patently Illegal
On Wednesday the British Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender staged a provocation by sailing through territorial waters of Crimea. The British government, which had explicitly instructed the destroyer to do so, insists that the move was legal:
The British government signed off on a plan to sail a battleship through disputed waters off the coast of Crimea, over the objections of its foreign policy chief, according to bombshell new claims in London's Telegraph newspaper.
In a report released on Thursday night, the outlet – known to be close to Prime Minister Boris Johnson – alleged that Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab had "raised concerns" about the mission, proposed by defense chiefs, in advance. He was reportedly worried that the move could hand a potential victory to Moscow.
The account of events claims that Johnson was ultimately called in to settle the dispute. The Type-45 destroyer HMS Defender was given its orders on Monday, ahead of a clash with the Russian navy and air force two days later.
The British government then lied about the incident insisting that no warning shots had been fired when the destroyer was in the relevant area. However, video material from the BBC, which had embedded with the destroyer, as well as footage from the Russian coastguard proved that to be false. The ship was warned to leave the area and warning shots were fired.
Russia insist that the 'innocent passage' of the warship through the relevant territorial waters was illegal.
Craig Murray, a former British diplomat who himself has negotiated several sea treaties, concurs with Russia's position:
The presence of a BBC correspondent is more than a political point. In fact it has important legal consequences. One thing that is plain is that the Defender cannot possible claim it was engaged in “innocent passage” through territorial waters, between Odessa and Georgia. Let me for now leave aside the fact that there is absolutely no necessity to pass within 12 miles of Cape Fiolent on such passage, and the designated sea lane (originally designated by Ukraine) stays just out of the territorial sea. Look at the definition of innocent passage in Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea:
…
Very plainly this was not innocent passage. It was certainly 2 (d) an act of propaganda, and equally certainly 2 (c), an exercise in collecting information on military defences. I would argue it is also 2 (a), a threat of force.
So far as I can establish, the British are not claiming they were engaged in innocent passage, which is plainly nonsense, but that they were entering territorial waters off Crimea at the invitation of the government of Ukraine, and that they regard Crimea as the territory of Ukraine and Crimean territorial waters as Ukrainian territorial waters.
Murray goes on to explain why that is an unsound argument but he misses an important legal point.
During the Ukrainian-Russian standoff in April this year both sides amassed troops near their border. Russia then introduced special restrictions on navigation of warships in parts of the Black Sea. In a Notice to Mariners Russia designated the areas around Crimea depicted below as forbidden for any foreign warship. No 'innocent passage' through these is allowed. The restrictions will be valid until October this year but may be extended.
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It was through one of these zones, which are next to sensitive military sites on land, that the British destroyer passed.
The British government insists that Crimea still belongs to the Ukraine and that the Ukraine had allowed it to pass through its territorial waters. It calls Russia's presence on Crimea an occupation. It supports the view of the Ukrainian government which insist that it alone can regulate the water areas around Crimea.
That view is wrong.
Prof. Dr. Stefan Talmon LL.M. M.A is the Director at the Institute of Public International Law at the University of Bonn. On May 4 he had published a legal opinion on the legality of the zones Russia had declared. On the above point he noted (emph. added):
Ukraine protested the Russian announcement, inter alia, on the ground that Russia was not the “coastal State” with regard to the territorial sea surrounding the “temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol.” According to the Ukrainian Government:
“These actions of the Russian Federation constitute another attempt to usurp Ukraine’s sovereign rights of a coastal state in violation of the norms and principles of international law, as Ukraine is in fact endowed with the right to regulate the navigation in these water areas of the Black Sea.”
The UN General Assembly condemned “the ongoing temporary occupation” of Crimea and urged the Russian Federation to “uphold all of its obligations under applicable international law as an occupying Power”. This raises the question of whether as an “occupying Power” the Russian Federation could temporarily suspend the innocent passage of foreign ships in the territorial sea of the occupied Crimean Peninsula. Occupation also extends to the occupied State’s territorial waters (internal waters and territorial sea) to the extent that effective control is established over the adjacent land territory. Under the law of armed conflict, the occupant may take measures to ensure “public order and safety” in the occupied territory, including its territorial waters. In particular, the occupying Power may take measures “to ensure the security of the Occupying Power, of the members and property of the occupying forces or administration, and likewise of the establishments and lines of communication used by them.” Under the laws of armed conflict, the occupying power has the right to suspend in all or in parts of the territorial sea of the occupied territory the innocent passage of foreign ships, if it considers it necessary for imperative reasons of security.
In determining whether such suspension is necessary, the occupying power enjoys a wide margin of discretion.
Even if Britain does not recognize that Crimea is Russian it still has to recognize that Russia, as the 'occupying power,' can regulate the traffic in the territorial waters of Crimea:
During the ongoing armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine the law of the sea is at least partly supplanted by the law of armed conflict and, in particular, the law of occupation. Germany and other States cannot consider Russia to be an occupying Power in Crimea and, at the same time, deny it the rights that come with that status.
There is precedence for Russia's move of which the British government is likely well aware of:
[O]n 2 May 2004, the United States, acting as an occupying Power in Iraq, issued a notice to mariners establishing with immediate effect a 2,000-metre exclusion zone around the Khawr Al’Amaya and Al Basra oil terminals in the Persian Gulf and temporarily suspended “the right of innocent passage […] in accordance with international law around [these] oil terminals within Iraqi territorial waters.”
That zone was continued until at least February 2006.
Prof. Talmon discusses various other arguments against Russia's declared zones. He finds that the zones are legal under all aspects of international law.
Ukraine has no right to interfere in the restrictions that Russia, which in the Ukrainian and British view is an occupying power, has posed on the territorial waters of Crimea. Russia has suspended the 'right of innocent passage' in those zones and the British destroyer acted illegally when it passed through them.
Professor Talmon published his legal analysis seven weeks before the HMS Defender incident. It is thus free from any undue influence.
Moreover Talmon is also a Supernumerary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where he previously taught, and practices as a Barrister from Twenty Essex, London.
The British government would be well advised to consult with him.
It otherwise might quite legally lose a warship to Russian missiles when it orders a repetition of Wednesday's patently illegal stunt.
What to make of this very aggressive provocation by Britain?
On the one hand, we just had the Putin-Biden summit that set a much-needed tone of respectful dialog and expectations of further consultation and even cooperation in some areas, notably ‘strategic stability’.
Then we have this slap in the face by titmouse Britain!
I think the reason we saw Biden pursuing Putin for a meeting [‘stalking’ as Martyanov puts it], is because somebody with half a brain in Washington saw the massive Russian forces and how quickly they deployed them to the Ukraine frontier, and decided that the bluffing game is no longer a viable option.
As Martyanov puts it, the only reason Washington now wants to talk about strategic stability is ‘because the Russians invented some shit which is really bad for US exceptionals.’
Those inventions being the astonishing advances in fundamental aerospace technologies as embodied in the hypersonic, intercontinental Avangard missile, which literally skips across the top of the atmosphere at Mach 25 [17,000 mph], like a flat pebble over a still pond. This is essentially a fully MANEUVERING ICBM, over its entire flightpath, and is not stoppable by any conceivable means. It was deployed already in ICBM silos, with American weapons inspectors present as per the arms treaties, back in 2019.
That is just one of several such hypersonic wonder-weapons that are either already in service or soon to enter initial operating capability. These were at first mocked as fantasy or bluff, but the reality has long since sunk in [see Five Stages of Grief]. The US defense intel has been gathering all kinds of actual flight test info, as these various missile systems are put through their qualification paces.
The US possesses ZERO such technology. And is not close to fielding even hypersonics of low to moderate range and capabilities, much less intercontinental.
Speaking as an aeronautical engineer, this is a Russian technology lead of at least a decade, perhaps more. The US are not going to close this gap. Not least of all because of a lack of engineering talent, and a badly broken and completely corrupt weapons procurement system. As in space technologies, where the US also lags, as I have talked about in previous posts here, there is no coherent direction from the top. Everything is left to self-serving corporate grifters.
One technology that I will briefly highlight here, which may be of interest to some. That is the scramjet engine technology of the Tsirkon hypersonic cruise missile, that is to be carried by Russian warships and subs.
In the 1990s, the Russians developed the world’s first flying scramjet engine. This is a type of engine that is air-breathing [like a jet, and unlike a rocket], but allows for reaching very high speeds, in excess of Mach 5 [well above 3,000 mph].
A turbojet engine as used on aircraft can only fly reliably to about Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. A ramjet engine, which has no moving parts, and relies on the speed of the vehicle to compress the air it ingests [thereby obviating the need for a jet engine’s turbomachinery like compressors and turbines] can reliably fly at speeds of Mach 3 to 4.
The Russians have long made use of ramjet technology for their missiles, for instance the Oniks cruise missile that is carried by ships, subs and aircraft. A version with shorter range was built for India, with India providing some development on the guidance software and electronics, but not the basic ramjet technology. This is the Brahmos missile. [India does now manufacture most of the missile under license, as with the advanced Sukhoi fighter jets it obtains from Russia.]
The US still doesn’t have any ramjet-powered , supersonic cruise missiles. All of its cruise missiles are strictly subsonic.
Incidentally, the coast of Crimea is protected by the ground-launched version of the Oniks missile, called the Bastion, carried on all-terrain heavy truck chassis for mobility and with a striking range of about 500 km. A ship like the HMS Defender, which is classed as an ‘air-defense’ destroyer, would have no chance of stopping even a small salvo of Bastions, or air or ship-launched Onikses, as they skim the sea surface and are thus not detected by ship’s radar until they come over the radar horizon of about 12 nautical miles. That leaves a reaction time of just seconds at the missile’s Mach 3 flight speed.
Sea-skimming missiles were used to astonishing effect in the Falklands War of 1982. The Argentines only had five total French-made Exocet sea-skimmers, which are subsonic and with a range of only about 100 km.
Still they sunk the then state-of-the-art Royal Navy Destroyer, HMS Sheffield [the forerunner to today’s Defender type]. Her sister destroyer, HMS Coventry was sunk by ordinary gravity bombs launched by a pair of Argentine Douglas A4 Skyhawks, the two pilots displaying remarkable elan and fighting spirit.
Two other Exocets struck a large 15,000 ton transport ship, and another struck the older HMS Glamorgan destroyer.
To say that a Mach 3 sea-skimmer like the Oniks-Bastion, with its 500 plus kilometer range, is far more dangerous than subsonic sea-skimmers is a vast understatement. Today’s ships have better defenses, but a salvo of even four to six such missiles will almost certainly send any ship to the bottom.
And now we are entering the era of the mcuh faster scramjet.
The Tsirkon, which will be carried in the same missile launch tubes as the Oniks and the subsonic Kalibr [the anti-ship Kalibr version does have a terminal supersonic sprint], flies at an incredible Mach 8 to 10. That is well over 5,000 mph. The US Navy admits its ship defenses cannot stop anything flying faster than Mach 3.
The scramjet engine is almost a holy grail in propulsion technology. Because it is air-breathing, like turbojets, it could one day find its place in civil aviation. At Mach 6, a nearly 14 hour flight from New York to Beijing becomes just a little over two hours.
By the 1990s the Russians had accumulated some quite remarkable aerospace technology, about which the world would only find out much later [and not much of that would ever be admitted in the lying western media]. I have already talked elsewhere about how both China and the US snagged massive space technology goodies during the Russian firesale of the 1990s.
Something similar was happening in the much less-known advanced aviation propulsion field. The Russians flew the world’s first scramjet engine in 1991, at a test range in Kazakhstan, having developed the basic technology already starting in the 1970s. Remarkably, the Central Institute of Aviation Motors, CIAM, strapped for cash, invited Nasa to participate in a series of further flight tests [at the Sary Shagan test range, Kazakhstan] of the world’s first flying scramjet engine, called Kholod, which means ‘cold’ in Russian.
A series of flight tests during the 1990s saw the Kholod reach a speed of Mach 6.5, well over 4,000 mph. The Russians even published several remarkable papers [co-written with the Nasa team] in the professional literature:
Future Flight Test Plans of an Axisymmetric Hydrogen-fueled Scramjet Engine On the Hypersonic Flying Laboratory
—published in the AIAA [American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics]
Recent Flight Test Results of the Joint CIAM-NASA Mach 6.5 Scramjet Flight Program
—Published by NASA
Despite this huge gift of advanced scramjet technology, the US has not progressed beyond a mixed record of various experiments, and is nowhere near fielding an actual production article. [Although much media noise has been generated about prototypes like the Boeing X51 Waverider].
Just to put into perspective how challenging this technology is, a speed of even Mach 6 is equal to over 6,000 feet per SECOND. In a scramjet the air being ingested at the front is slowed down to just over Mach 1 inside the combustion chamber [unlike a ramjet which slows the flow down to subsonic, which also limits its top speed].
That is why it is called a SCramjet, for supersonic combustion. It means the flow of air through the combustion chamber is over 1,000 ft/s. If the chamber is even three feet long, it means that ignition and full combustion of the fuel must be achieved in one three hundredth of a second—an almost impossible task, given the chemical thermodynamic properties of fuel.
The key to the Russian success seems to be in the fuel chemistry, which the Russians call ‘Detsilin’. Of course, this fuel chemistry is a closely guarded secret.
So yes, Martyanov is absolutely right. The Russians have ‘invented some shit’. And in fact some of that ‘shit’ scares the ‘shit’ out of some people, who know enough to know that fear is a healthy part of self-preservation.
I think Peter AU in another thread mentioned that the US would launch a nuclear first strike on Russia if they thought they could get away with it.
I absolutely agree with that. In fact it is quite easy to find various statements from various US think tanks and such calling for such a first-strike capability. This is not in any doubt, and the entire missile defense project is aimed at that eventual goal.
But we have also seen that the so-called US ‘missile defense’ may be nothing more than wishful thinking. We recall that Kim Jong Un was not too impressed as he sailed missile after missile over the heads of The US Pacific Fleet, which consists of no less than 17 Arleigh-Burke class Aegis missile defense ships, plus four such Japanese ships.
Not a single intercept was attempted with the highly touted Aegis BMD [ballistic missile defense] system! Surely a successful intercept of these DPRK missiles, most of which were actually only intermediate-range missiles [IRBM] that fly at much slower speeds than ICBMs, would have sent a huge message to the entire world, especially Russia. In fact such a message of intercepting even an IRBM would be similar to the shock and awe of Hiroshima and Nagasaki!
But it seems that when it comes to US weapons capabilities, there is a big gap between the walk and the talk!
Weapons technology is the ultimate decider in world politics. Many peoples and empires have been crushed or even wiped out throughout history by stronger opponents possessing more powerful weapons. The age of European global conquest was based almost entirely on superior weapons technology.
Now, Putin publicly says: ‘Russia is ahead of the US for the first time.’
This is not debatable. And it is the beginning of a downward trajectory of the US and its hangers-on that encompasses many civilizational aspects, besides advanced aerospace and nuclear technologies.
There will come a day, when such provocations as with HMS Defender will be unthinkable. And it may not be that far off.
Posted by: Gordog | Jun 25 2021 21:26 utc | 95
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