“Demonstration of the power we possess”
The crews of the ships of the NATO and Ukrainian Navies-participants of the NATO Sea Breeze-2021 maneuvers, currently taking place in the Black Sea, had to worry yesterday when they heard the hum of Russian combat aircraft in the sky. The NATO sailors clearly have not yet had time to forget the words of Vladimir Putin, said by him during the recent “Direct Line”, when the Russian president did not rule out that the British destroyer Defender could have been sunk for violating our border.
Photo: Alex Beltyukov.
After such a warning, a dozen Russian fighters and bombers that appeared near NATO ships were perceived by the participants of Sea Breeze as a completely serious threat. A military expert told about what our aircraft demonstrated in the area of the NATO exercises.
According to the official version of the Russian military department, the naval aviation of the Black Sea Fleet and the Southern Military District conducted regular combat training flights over the Black Sea. They involved the Be-12 amphibious aircraft, Su-30SM multi-purpose fighters and Su-24M front-line bombers, Su-34 fighter-bombers and Su-27 interceptor fighters. The composition of the forces, you will agree, is very convincing.
And what did our pilots work out with this composition? The military, of course, will answer: standard combat tasks. Perhaps so. However, after Vladimir Putin’s words about how the provocation of the British destroyer Defender in the Black Sea could have ended, the picture of the exercises looks more like a full-scale model for the particularly incomprehensible.
The fact is that our planes alternately, then in pairs, then singly, going on a combat course, practiced missile and bomb attacks on targets that imitate a detachment of surface ships of a conditional enemy. It was designated by the large landing ships “Saratov” and “Orsk”.
Of course, it would be much more plausible to do without imitations if, for example, our pilots could play along with the direct participants of Sea Breeze-the British destroyer Defender or the Dutch frigate Evertsen. But they have already tried. They didn’t like it.
The Defender crew barely escaped, and now the chief of the British Defense Staff, Nicholas Carter, complains to the English press that he does not sleep at night, analyzing “this miscalculation” and “unjustified escalation”.
And the Dutch Evertsen is still repairing its electronics, which failed after our aircraft with electronic warfare systems flew over it.
Both ships have already left the Black Sea, having passed the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits.
“There is no secret,” explained the military expert, Captain of the 1st rank Vladimir Gundarov, ” that the exercises of our aviation, taking place simultaneously with Sea Breeze, are a demonstration of the strength that we possess. We don’t reveal any special secrets here, but at the same time we show that we can do a lot in this area.
And, by the way, not only in this. Just yesterday, Washington decided to strengthen its grouping in the Pacific Ocean after we conducted an exercise & ndash; a number of Western media are now writing about it – literally 50 km from Hawaii. This is a kind of our response to the NATO Sea Breeze in our Black Sea. And the answer is very unpleasant, since our “Hawaiian” exercises were conducted in close coordination with China, which was also emphasized by the Prime Minister of Japan.
Well, the fact that we conducted our aviation exercises there in the Black Sea, which “accidentally coincided” with their Sea Breeze maneuvers, there is nothing special here. What should we do if we, the Europeans and the Americans all have the same cycles of military training? So everything happens as planned. Both we and they have demonstrated their capabilities. Not only military, but also political. Ours, it seems, turned out to be cooler.