Russia's Defence Ministry released footage Friday showing a Russian Pacific Fleet warship sailing less than 60 meters from a US destroyer threatening to violate Moscow's maritime borders in the Sea of Japan.
The video shows the Admiral Tributs, an Udaloy-class large anti-submarine ship (classified by NATO as a destroyer) from Russia's Pacific Fleet approaching the USS Chafee, an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, in a bid to drive the warship from the area after the vessel ignored several warnings.
The military indicated that the Chafee had been informed that it was sailing through an area of the sea closed to foreign vessels due to Russian-Chinese "Maritime Interaction-2021" artillery drills being carried out in the area between 14 and 17 October.
"The Chafee, convinced of the Russian ship crew's determination not to allow it to violate the state border, changed direction, and at 5:50 pm turned around after less than 60 meters were left between it and the Admiral Tributs," the ministry said.
The Russian military stressed that throughout the incident, the Admiral Tributs remained fully in line with international regulations governing maritime navigation. It further alleged that the Chafee's actions constituted a "blatant violation" of international rules aimed at preventing the collision of ships at sea, and the 1972 Russian-American bilateral treaty aimed at avoiding maritime incidents in the open sea and the airspace above it.
The defence ministry summoned the defence attache from the US Embassy in Moscow in connection with the incident on Friday evening, with the attache instructed to appear at the MoD's main directorate on international military cooperation to discuss the attempted maritime border violation. The diplomat has been informed that Russia considers the actions of the crew of the Chafee to have been "unprofessional."
Friday's close call follows an episode in June in the Black Sea during which Russian warships were
forced to fire warning shots at a British destroyer which violated Russia's maritime border near Crimea. The destroyer's flirtation with Russian waters plunged relations between Moscow and London to new post-Cold War lows, and prompted Russia to warn that all of NATO's warships in the Black Sea constitute "fat targets" for Russian anti-ship missiles.
Last November, the Russian military reported a separate close call in the Sea of Japan involving a US warship, saying that the large anti-submarine ship Admiral Vinogradov caught the US Navy destroyer USS John McCain operating over 2 km inside Russian waters in the Peter the Great Gulf and pushed it out by
threatening to ram it. The US denied any wrongdoing and insisted that its warship was not "expelled" from the area but left of its own volition.
The captains of Russian warships have not been averse to resorting to ramming attacks to push violating vessels away from the country's waters. In February 1988, the Soviet frigate Bezzavetny bumped the USS Yorktown, a US cruiser, as it sailed illegally in Soviet waters in the Black Sea. The USS Caron destroyer, which was sailing alongside the Yorktown at the time, was shouldered by the Soviet SKR-6 frigate. The incident was caught on video by a US sailor.