A German military helicopter was fired upon by a Russian ship in the Baltic Sea, the latest escalation in tensions between Moscow and the West, a report in German media states.
A Bundeswehr (Federal German armed forces) helicopter was shot at by a Russian ship in the Baltic Sea with a signalling flare, the German Press Agency (DPA) has said. When this event is alleged to have taken place has not been made clear, but Deutsche Welle states the Russian ship responsible for the dangerous act was a “tanker”.
A signal flare launcher is generally a gun in the conventional sense and fires a rocket-propelled pyrotechnic that gives off a great deal of heat and light to assist in search and rescue operations, or for other communications at sea. Other forms of flares are used as countermeasures, as the emission of heat and light can be used to protect ships, tanks, aircraft and missiles by confusing missiles trying to seek heat or other radio-wave signatures.
While they are not meant as weapons, the directed energy and high heat could pose some risk, particularly to aviation.
The Baltic Sea incident appears to have come to light after it was referred to obliquely by German Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock at the side-lines of a NATO conference. Concerns about the state of relations between Russia and the West are high, and talk of escalation is widespread in European capitals. At the time of publication, Germany’s defence ministry has only no-commented on the claims raised by the DPA.
The firing of a flare directly at a helicopter was by a legally civilian ship. Yet on one hand the use of ostensibly merchant vessels to engage in hybrid warfare-style attacks has already been recently alleged, and on the other Moscow has a very long history of disguising military ships as civilian.
The use of signal flares is a very clear return to the behaviour of the Russian fleet at the height of the Cold War when confrontations with non-lethal techniques were commonplace. As recorded by former top U.S. Admiral “Bud” Zumwalt Jr., American fleets were frequently locked in “an extremely dangerous, but exhilarating, running game of chicken” with the Russians who worked to make life as difficult as possible for American sailors without actually opening fire on them.
As reported, when Zumwalt captained a destroyer in the Baltic he witnessed Soviet tactics to harass American battlegroups including “aiming weapons, shooting flares, blinding with searchlights, and conducting dangerous manoeuvres”.
Such cat-and-mouse games are already well known in the seas around China, where the People’s Liberation Army-Navy coastguard constantly harasses the shipping of other states with dangerous manoeuvres sometimes amounting to purposeful collisions and spraying with high-power firefighting hoses. They have also been seen in the skies above Ukraine, where the Russian air force brought down an American spy drone by dumping fuel on it mid-flight, and by eventually clipping it with the harassing passing fighter jet, causing a total loss.
Such tactics can escalate, however. It was reported earlier this year that a Russian warship fired a warning shot at a Norwegian trawler fishing inside Norway’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) waters after it demanded the boat leave the area.