A Russian SU-24 Fencer fighter jet made multiple “close-range low-altitude” passes at the USS Donald Cook earlier today, in a move the Pentagon dubbed a deliberate provocation. Russia has not attempted to explain the incident.
Pentagon officials said the plane refused all attempts at radio contact, but did not appear to be armed with any bombs, suggesting a SU-24MR or SU-24MP, both reconnaissance planes. They said a second Fencer was with the plane initially but kept its distance.
One Pentagon official, who insisted on anonymity, also claimed that a Russian frigate is following the USS Donald Cook, keeping within visual range but not so close as to be unsafe.
Since the Russian annexation of Crimea, the US has been keen to send warships to the Black Sea, though the individual ships don’t pose a serious challenge to Russian naval control of the region. The real danger, rather, is that an incident like today’s overflights could provoke a clash between the US and Russia.
I strongly suspect that the FedGov fleet has overstated the reconnoitering of its ship, in the hopes that its knee-jerk supporters will get themselves worked up into a lather over it.
According to the small print in the report, the plane was over 1000 yards away and appeared to be unarmed – so yup.
They simply saying, buzz off from our territories, Yankee go home.
The USS Donald Duck, should be elsewhere.
I modestly propose that it be turned into an amusement park in Anaheim, California. The Obama regimists can come, at no cost, and get the chance to be strapped to the destroyer's missiles and fired down the Pacific Test Range.
Russia is too smart to let the USG goad it into doing something stupid.
Guess we'll have to listen to more war-mongering from chicken hawks
in the US Congress peanut gallery.
I'm old enough to remember the reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin incident(s). This has a strangely familiar sound.
in fact, that little fib enabled me, at the Army's request, to spend some quality time along the South China Sea.
Lets' reverse the story. Imagine a Russian naval ship, in the Gulf of Mexico, not to far off the coast of Texas and thousands of miles from Russian shores. Now imagine a USA plane "buzzing" said ship and Russia calling it a "provocation".