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Russia’s Naval Provocations in UK Waters Aim to Spread Fear, Expert Says
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![Photo of Roman Kohanets]( "Photo of Roman Kohanets")
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The “peace dividend” era has ended for the North Atlantic, a maritime scholar warned as the Royal Navy logged a surge in Russian ship movements around the British Isles this year.
In an interview published in Forces News on October 9, Basil Germond, professor of international security at Lancaster University, said recent passages by Russian vessels are calibrated for hybrid and psychological effect: “One of the objectives is to instil fear and uncertainty within the British public… It’s not just directed at the critical infrastructure or at UK defense. It’s also directed at British society as a whole.”
The uptick follows earlier reporting that Russian military- and state-linked ships have been detected in UK waters more than 40 times since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, including multiple instances near subsea data cables and energy infrastructure. The Russian embassy has denied posing threats, but British officials say the pattern fits grey-zone tactics designed to unsettle and probe.
Germond noted that while international law allows innocent and expeditious passage under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, attribution is difficult when intelligence gathering is plausibly deniable. He argued that NATO states should prioritize “in flagrante delicto”—catching malign actors in the act—and then “name and shame” to blunt the information effects of such operations.
The trend is not confined to the UK. Denmark has recently accused Russian forces of pointing weapons and using tracking radars against its ships and helicopters in the Danish Straits, part of a broader pattern of maritime provocations around northern Europe.
Royal Navy tracking operations are set to continue, with officials signaling expanded undersea monitoring and protection measures to harden critical links. As Germond put it, the task now is credibility—exposing activities in real time to reduce Moscow’s room for deniability while avoiding escalation at sea.
Earlier, it was reported that the Yantar spy ship has been deploying covert operations near the UK and Irish undersea infrastructure, raising alarms about its proximity to critical cables and pipelines.
