17 ms·

Positions of Two NATO Ships Were Falsified Near Russian Black Sea Naval Base

96 points by Nokinside 5y ago

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Smart. "...while moored 180 miles away." Cyber ghost ships save fuel, don't endanger anyone, and are therefore good for the environment °v° Now the russians could prank the baltics by switching on their virtual transponders, and give all the Susi Sommerlochs of the Lügenpresse something to do by reporting countless intrusions of russian aggressor planes into Nahtod-Airspace. (Foaming at the mouth)
- trhway 5y ago
  add GPS spoofing/jamming. The non-military GPS spoofing/jamming is a usual part in the drone war in Donbass and will probably be so in any future happenings. In the context of transponder and GPS data faking and spoofing, i think the US destroyers suddenly hitting various things few years back weren't just accidents.
  - fuoqi 5y ago
    Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Don't forget that USA military uses the encrypted P(Y)-code GPS signals, which can not be spoofed by adversary. Yes, they can be jammed, but IIRC modern military ships and planes equipped with very presice IMUs, so they are quite immune to a short-term GPS jamming. And even before that, spoofing or jamming which has caused such incident can be easily detected and it would have been immideately publicly reported.
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      > Don't forget that USA military uses the encrypted P(Y)-code GPS signals Do they? The whole reason Selective Availability was switched off (and is no longer built-in at all) is that the same US military found that cheap civilian GPS was readily available while specialist military GPS was always back-ordered. > which can not be spoofed by adversary Those signals just need a (secret) key, they aren't Hollywood plot magic that prevents spoofing. Your annoying older brother doesn't have the US military secret key for GPS, but I see absolutely no reason to believe that the Russians have somehow never been able to obtain this key. The more you wriggle on the first point the more salient the second point becomes - if the US military has millions of military keyed GPS units, Russia could trivially steal one. And the less important the second point, the more the first applies - if Russia can't steal these keys because only a dozen military GPS units are deployed, there likely wasn't one feeding this (civilian anyway) AIS transmitter.
      - fuoqi 5y ago
        Since I do not serve in the US military, I don't know for sure, but I would be really surprised if it was not the case, especially for ships and planes. I'd imagine keys are rotated on regular basis. If you think that Russia has a reliable access to those keys, then USA military has FAR bigger issues than hypotetical spoofing. And you have not adressed the second part of my comment. Not only we haven't heard about spoofing as a reason for those incidents, but also even with civilian recievers spoofing can be detected by comparing GNSS and IMU data. And even before that you can detect anomalous power of GNSS signal (since spoofing usually has to outpowr legitimate signal) or find that there are "satellites" which produce unconsistent signals.
        trhway 5y ago
        >If you think that Russia has a reliable access to those keys, then USA military has FAR bigger issues than hypotetical spoofing. btw, i don't think it was Russia, to me it looks like China who has much better access in particular to the technological layers of the US defense systems. Sailors on these destroyers at night were looking at those screens with "confusing UI" - you don't need to spoof GPS/etc. if you cracked the access to the UI, and that it was the same destroyer type fits well into it.
      - ytpete 5y ago
        Wouldn't this likely be using asymmetric encryption though? In that case obtaining the public key from a stolen receiver would only let you read the high-precision P(Y) signals – you couldn't spoof them since you still don't have the private key.
        sudosysgen 5y ago
        And yet, they have been spoofed in the past, multiple times, by opponents weaker than Russia. Instead of breaking the encryption, you just replay delayed signals.
        tialaramex 5y ago
        > Wouldn't this likely be using asymmetric encryption though? It isn't, but even if it was, not in a way that makes this attack significantly more difficult. The problem you have is that GPS receivers are receiving one or more bit streams and passively discerning their position from the timing of those bit streams. In something like TLS (except 0RTT early_data) both peers begin by introducing randomness to each session. So this connection must be the new connection I just created, if you try to send me packets from an earlier session, the random parameters are all wrong and it's unintelligible. Verifying this is called "freshness". In contrast a passive receiver can't check for freshness. It just has to believe whatever it is told, no choice. So, as an adversary I can spoof your position by simply feeding you stale data. I probably shouldn't try to persuade you this is actually the middle of the Pacific ocean not the Black Sea, nor that it's actually January rather than June, but I can certainly fudge things a little bit without too much trouble.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      There is no need to crack the key. You just need to replay the signals with variable per-satellite delay to shift the position however you want.
- nojokes 5y ago
  NATO airspace is controlled by real radars and violation of it will trigger a real interception response.
  - mb_72 5y ago
    Indeed. It happens very often that Russia causes such violations: https://news.err.ee/1608255123/nato-planes-scrambled-eight-times-last-week-in-response-to-russia-flights https://news.err.ee/1608255123/nato-planes-scrambled-eight-t...
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      So what? NAhTOd doesn't? https://www.rt.com/russia/521283-fighter-jet-spy-plane/ https://www.rt.com/russia/521283-fighter-jet-spy-plane/ https://www.rt.com/russia/515861-french-planes-intercept-black-sea/ https://www.rt.com/russia/515861-french-planes-intercept-bla... https://www.rt.com/russia/507633-navy-threat-warship-border/ https://www.rt.com/russia/507633-navy-threat-warship-border/ https://www.rt.com/russia/500016-nato-imitate-missile-stikes-russia/ https://www.rt.com/russia/500016-nato-imitate-missile-stikes... https://www.rt.com/russia/499908-b52-bombers-intercepted-crimea/ https://www.rt.com/russia/499908-b52-bombers-intercepted-cri... https://www.rt.com/russia/496701-russia-intercept-us-plane-black-sea/ https://www.rt.com/russia/496701-russia-intercept-us-plane-b... https://www.rt.com/russia/496003-us-spy-plane-intercept-black-sea/ https://www.rt.com/russia/496003-us-spy-plane-intercept-blac... https://www.rt.com/russia/491915-russia-jets-us-bombers-baltics/ https://www.rt.com/russia/491915-russia-jets-us-bombers-balt... https://www.rt.com/russia/490168-russia-jets-us-strategic-bomber/ https://www.rt.com/russia/490168-russia-jets-us-strategic-bo... And do you think these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_EC-135 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_EC-135 and these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_RC-135 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_RC-135 are only taxiing on their runways at home, just to be prepared? Hm?
      - mb_72 5y ago
        RT is hardly an independent news organisation. And how many of those are 'near' Russian borders, which is not the same as actually being inside NATO airspace... as you well know.
mekkkkkk 5y ago
The article makes it sound like this could have been mistaken for actual ship movement by the Russian navy. But surely it can't be the case that self reported, public beacon information like AIS is being taken seriously in a military context?
- chociej 5y ago
  The Russians know as well as the rest of the world does that AIS is totally unauthenticated and wildly spoofable. Any indication by a navy that they were provoked by an AIS track is therefore probably just theater.
BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
Says ","sameAs":[]}]} at the top
fuoqi 5y ago
The article implies that AIS was spoofed by the Russian side, but I find it more likely it was a case of trolling from the Ukranian side. Considering that USA and Russia have significant SIGINT capabilities in the region, finding source of the signal and determining that its a fake one should be quite easy for them. And it goes without saying that any competent military will not trust easily spoofable AIS data.
- papito 5y ago
  1. Geopolitical trolling is not a Ukrainian thing, like at all (but definitely is Russian, even through official embassy accounts) 2. They would never do something as dumb when it comes to NATO or the US. There is zero reason to. So, you have to define what the actual trolling here would be.
  - fuoqi 5y ago
    >Geopolitical trolling is not a Ukrainian thing, like at all Trying to get Nazi collaborant's slogan on the national football team uniforms is not a case of geopolitical trolling? Yes, Ukraine has significantly smaller capabilities compared to Russia, so you don't hear about it as often, especially in the western outlets, but it still tries to hurt Russia where it can (not to blame Ukraine, it's a logical behaviour considering the currently dominant narrative in the country). Also note that I have not said that it was done by the Ukranian goverment (altough I would not be surprised considering its sheer incompetence), AIS spoofing can be done relatively easy by civilians with sufficient knowledge and hardware. >They would never do something as dumb when it comes to NATO or the US. Sending a diversion group into Crimea was not dumb? Biden has famously scolded Poroshenko for this. What about sending military ships through the Kerch strait without following adequate procedures (IIRC Ukranian military ships have passed it without issues like month before the incident) in an attempt to influence upcoming elections? Compared to those provocations, AIS spoofing is a child's play. >There is zero reason to. Getting Russian military into a state of high alert for effectively zero cost? Not that it would work of course.
    - baybal2 5y ago
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
Vessels transmitting AIS data over VHF (location, speed, bearing, name, size and rate of turn of vessel etc) help other ships from colliding with it - but it can't really be relied on for tracking and I'd be amazed if any military relied on it (In a military manoeuvre I'd guess they turn it off) Presumably the GPS was blocked/misdirected 'by some means' and this got published by the AIS systems.
- cmdkeen 5y ago
  AIS is an aide to navigational safety, but cannot and is not relied upon as a sole source of data. Not every vessel is required to have it, or have redundant systems for it. As this article suggests it's not verifiable information and can be spoofed in various ways, or just switched off if you're up to no good. Various international bodies are keen to come up with standards to reduce the opportunity for spoofing AIS, but it will likely not go anywhere. The Project Sandstone series from RUSI digs into various techniques smugglers and sanctions busters use to hide or mask illicit activity at sea.
- jandrewrogers 5y ago
  This isn't manipulation of GPS. Anyone can send a spoofed or manipulated AIS signal, it is quite common in the wild and trivial to do. Most military systems, and certainly all US ones, rely on inertial navigation systems, not GPS. GPS was considered unreliable for navigation when it was built, which was fine for its intended purpose.
  - CobaltFire 5y ago
    This is patently false. Though we use Inertial, it's one component of an overall system that includes GPS. When we have degraded GPS we have to allow for larger error margins, based on time since last positional fix. There are other systems that allow us to reset the inertial, including manual fixes, if absolutely necessary. To say that a modern military doesn't use GPS for navigation is flat wrong.
    - jandrewrogers 5y ago
yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
I'm currently living in Odessa, and my apartment has a direct view of the sea. I have seen a number of military vessels sailing past recently — more than usual. I also saw two MV-22 Osprey aircraft flying overhead yesterday, which I haven't seen before.
- jt2190 5y ago
  Operation “Sea Breeze” 2021 https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/2664699/us-sixth-fleet-announces-sea-breeze-2021-participation/ https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/26646...
- petre 5y ago
  It's probably in the context of Russia amassing troops on Ukraine's eastern border and Ukraine's current govenrnment's plan to obtain the Action Plan for Membership (MAP) in NATO in 2021. NATO had it's 2021 summit in Busseles this very month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations#Ukrainian_bid_to_join_the_NATO_Membership_Action_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
paganel 5y ago
The port of Odessa is already pretty damn close to Sevastopol, I'd gather the Americans would see two Russian warships stationed in the port of Havana as practically being stationed in Miami or Key West. It's too bad that the Montreux Treaty doesn't mean anything anymore and that things got to escalate this far (I live very close to where all this is happening and it kind of makes me very nervous).
- petre 5y ago
  Except Sevastopol is in Crimea which is internationally recognized as being part of Ukraine, not Russia. Gdansk is also basically a stick's throw from Kalinigrad. The presence of NATO forces in the ports of Odessa, Constanta or Varna would improve the balance of power in the Black Sea, which would otherwise become a Russian lake now that Turkey has its own agenda and it's not such a reliable partner as it was in the past.
  - pirate787 5y ago
    Crimea is ethnically Russian and was only part of Ukraine as an accident of Soviet political history.
    - sgc 5y ago
      Oh, all good then. Nothing to see here.
    - thinkcontext 5y ago
      And Russia agreed to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine giving up nuclear weapons.
      - 0x737368 5y ago
        Surely that changes when the government of a country has shifted to an aggressively anti-Russian one which will threaten one of your country's few naval ports and will likely welcome American military bases with open arms. Or should Russia just bend the knee to the US overlords and be a good lapdog?
Aerroon 5y ago
It still surprises me just how much information is out there on the internet. I wonder how much you could track military movements by simply monitoring publicly available webcams. Anyone can see exactly when these two warships leave port by watching the webcam.

96 points by Nokinside 5y ago

Smart. "...while moored 180 miles away." Cyber ghost ships save fuel, don't endanger anyone, and are therefore good for the environment °v° Now the russians could prank the baltics by switching on their virtual transponders, and give all the Susi Sommerlochs of the Lügenpresse something to do by reporting countless intrusions of russian aggressor planes into Nahtod-Airspace. (Foaming at the mouth)

trhway 5y ago
add GPS spoofing/jamming. The non-military GPS spoofing/jamming is a usual part in the drone war in Donbass and will probably be so in any future happenings. In the context of transponder and GPS data faking and spoofing, i think the US destroyers suddenly hitting various things few years back weren't just accidents.
- fuoqi 5y ago
  Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Don't forget that USA military uses the encrypted P(Y)-code GPS signals, which can not be spoofed by adversary. Yes, they can be jammed, but IIRC modern military ships and planes equipped with very presice IMUs, so they are quite immune to a short-term GPS jamming. And even before that, spoofing or jamming which has caused such incident can be easily detected and it would have been immideately publicly reported.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    > Don't forget that USA military uses the encrypted P(Y)-code GPS signals Do they? The whole reason Selective Availability was switched off (and is no longer built-in at all) is that the same US military found that cheap civilian GPS was readily available while specialist military GPS was always back-ordered. > which can not be spoofed by adversary Those signals just need a (secret) key, they aren't Hollywood plot magic that prevents spoofing. Your annoying older brother doesn't have the US military secret key for GPS, but I see absolutely no reason to believe that the Russians have somehow never been able to obtain this key. The more you wriggle on the first point the more salient the second point becomes - if the US military has millions of military keyed GPS units, Russia could trivially steal one. And the less important the second point, the more the first applies - if Russia can't steal these keys because only a dozen military GPS units are deployed, there likely wasn't one feeding this (civilian anyway) AIS transmitter.
    - fuoqi 5y ago
      Since I do not serve in the US military, I don't know for sure, but I would be really surprised if it was not the case, especially for ships and planes. I'd imagine keys are rotated on regular basis. If you think that Russia has a reliable access to those keys, then USA military has FAR bigger issues than hypotetical spoofing. And you have not adressed the second part of my comment. Not only we haven't heard about spoofing as a reason for those incidents, but also even with civilian recievers spoofing can be detected by comparing GNSS and IMU data. And even before that you can detect anomalous power of GNSS signal (since spoofing usually has to outpowr legitimate signal) or find that there are "satellites" which produce unconsistent signals.
      - trhway 5y ago
        >If you think that Russia has a reliable access to those keys, then USA military has FAR bigger issues than hypotetical spoofing. btw, i don't think it was Russia, to me it looks like China who has much better access in particular to the technological layers of the US defense systems. Sailors on these destroyers at night were looking at those screens with "confusing UI" - you don't need to spoof GPS/etc. if you cracked the access to the UI, and that it was the same destroyer type fits well into it.
    - ytpete 5y ago
      Wouldn't this likely be using asymmetric encryption though? In that case obtaining the public key from a stolen receiver would only let you read the high-precision P(Y) signals – you couldn't spoof them since you still don't have the private key.
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        And yet, they have been spoofed in the past, multiple times, by opponents weaker than Russia. Instead of breaking the encryption, you just replay delayed signals.
      - tialaramex 5y ago
        > Wouldn't this likely be using asymmetric encryption though? It isn't, but even if it was, not in a way that makes this attack significantly more difficult. The problem you have is that GPS receivers are receiving one or more bit streams and passively discerning their position from the timing of those bit streams. In something like TLS (except 0RTT early_data) both peers begin by introducing randomness to each session. So this connection must be the new connection I just created, if you try to send me packets from an earlier session, the random parameters are all wrong and it's unintelligible. Verifying this is called "freshness". In contrast a passive receiver can't check for freshness. It just has to believe whatever it is told, no choice. So, as an adversary I can spoof your position by simply feeding you stale data. I probably shouldn't try to persuade you this is actually the middle of the Pacific ocean not the Black Sea, nor that it's actually January rather than June, but I can certainly fudge things a little bit without too much trouble.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    There is no need to crack the key. You just need to replay the signals with variable per-satellite delay to shift the position however you want.
nojokes 5y ago
NATO airspace is controlled by real radars and violation of it will trigger a real interception response.
- mb_72 5y ago
  Indeed. It happens very often that Russia causes such violations: https://news.err.ee/1608255123/nato-planes-scrambled-eight-times-last-week-in-response-to-russia-flights https://news.err.ee/1608255123/nato-planes-scrambled-eight-t...
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    So what? NAhTOd doesn't? https://www.rt.com/russia/521283-fighter-jet-spy-plane/ https://www.rt.com/russia/521283-fighter-jet-spy-plane/ https://www.rt.com/russia/515861-french-planes-intercept-black-sea/ https://www.rt.com/russia/515861-french-planes-intercept-bla... https://www.rt.com/russia/507633-navy-threat-warship-border/ https://www.rt.com/russia/507633-navy-threat-warship-border/ https://www.rt.com/russia/500016-nato-imitate-missile-stikes-russia/ https://www.rt.com/russia/500016-nato-imitate-missile-stikes... https://www.rt.com/russia/499908-b52-bombers-intercepted-crimea/ https://www.rt.com/russia/499908-b52-bombers-intercepted-cri... https://www.rt.com/russia/496701-russia-intercept-us-plane-black-sea/ https://www.rt.com/russia/496701-russia-intercept-us-plane-b... https://www.rt.com/russia/496003-us-spy-plane-intercept-black-sea/ https://www.rt.com/russia/496003-us-spy-plane-intercept-blac... https://www.rt.com/russia/491915-russia-jets-us-bombers-baltics/ https://www.rt.com/russia/491915-russia-jets-us-bombers-balt... https://www.rt.com/russia/490168-russia-jets-us-strategic-bomber/ https://www.rt.com/russia/490168-russia-jets-us-strategic-bo... And do you think these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_EC-135 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_EC-135 and these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_RC-135 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_RC-135 are only taxiing on their runways at home, just to be prepared? Hm?
    - mb_72 5y ago
      RT is hardly an independent news organisation. And how many of those are 'near' Russian borders, which is not the same as actually being inside NATO airspace... as you well know.

mekkkkkk 5y ago

The article makes it sound like this could have been mistaken for actual ship movement by the Russian navy. But surely it can't be the case that self reported, public beacon information like AIS is being taken seriously in a military context?

chociej 5y ago
The Russians know as well as the rest of the world does that AIS is totally unauthenticated and wildly spoofable. Any indication by a navy that they were provoked by an AIS track is therefore probably just theater.

BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago

Says ","sameAs":[]}]} at the top

fuoqi 5y ago

The article implies that AIS was spoofed by the Russian side, but I find it more likely it was a case of trolling from the Ukranian side. Considering that USA and Russia have significant SIGINT capabilities in the region, finding source of the signal and determining that its a fake one should be quite easy for them. And it goes without saying that any competent military will not trust easily spoofable AIS data.

papito 5y ago
1. Geopolitical trolling is not a Ukrainian thing, like at all (but definitely is Russian, even through official embassy accounts) 2. They would never do something as dumb when it comes to NATO or the US. There is zero reason to. So, you have to define what the actual trolling here would be.
- fuoqi 5y ago
  >Geopolitical trolling is not a Ukrainian thing, like at all Trying to get Nazi collaborant's slogan on the national football team uniforms is not a case of geopolitical trolling? Yes, Ukraine has significantly smaller capabilities compared to Russia, so you don't hear about it as often, especially in the western outlets, but it still tries to hurt Russia where it can (not to blame Ukraine, it's a logical behaviour considering the currently dominant narrative in the country). Also note that I have not said that it was done by the Ukranian goverment (altough I would not be surprised considering its sheer incompetence), AIS spoofing can be done relatively easy by civilians with sufficient knowledge and hardware. >They would never do something as dumb when it comes to NATO or the US. Sending a diversion group into Crimea was not dumb? Biden has famously scolded Poroshenko for this. What about sending military ships through the Kerch strait without following adequate procedures (IIRC Ukranian military ships have passed it without issues like month before the incident) in an attempt to influence upcoming elections? Compared to those provocations, AIS spoofing is a child's play. >There is zero reason to. Getting Russian military into a state of high alert for effectively zero cost? Not that it would work of course.
  - baybal2 5y ago

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

Vessels transmitting AIS data over VHF (location, speed, bearing, name, size and rate of turn of vessel etc) help other ships from colliding with it - but it can't really be relied on for tracking and I'd be amazed if any military relied on it (In a military manoeuvre I'd guess they turn it off) Presumably the GPS was blocked/misdirected 'by some means' and this got published by the AIS systems.

cmdkeen 5y ago
AIS is an aide to navigational safety, but cannot and is not relied upon as a sole source of data. Not every vessel is required to have it, or have redundant systems for it. As this article suggests it's not verifiable information and can be spoofed in various ways, or just switched off if you're up to no good. Various international bodies are keen to come up with standards to reduce the opportunity for spoofing AIS, but it will likely not go anywhere. The Project Sandstone series from RUSI digs into various techniques smugglers and sanctions busters use to hide or mask illicit activity at sea.
jandrewrogers 5y ago
This isn't manipulation of GPS. Anyone can send a spoofed or manipulated AIS signal, it is quite common in the wild and trivial to do. Most military systems, and certainly all US ones, rely on inertial navigation systems, not GPS. GPS was considered unreliable for navigation when it was built, which was fine for its intended purpose.
- CobaltFire 5y ago
  This is patently false. Though we use Inertial, it's one component of an overall system that includes GPS. When we have degraded GPS we have to allow for larger error margins, based on time since last positional fix. There are other systems that allow us to reset the inertial, including manual fixes, if absolutely necessary. To say that a modern military doesn't use GPS for navigation is flat wrong.
  - jandrewrogers 5y ago

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago

I'm currently living in Odessa, and my apartment has a direct view of the sea. I have seen a number of military vessels sailing past recently — more than usual. I also saw two MV-22 Osprey aircraft flying overhead yesterday, which I haven't seen before.

jt2190 5y ago
Operation “Sea Breeze” 2021 https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/2664699/us-sixth-fleet-announces-sea-breeze-2021-participation/ https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/26646...
petre 5y ago
It's probably in the context of Russia amassing troops on Ukraine's eastern border and Ukraine's current govenrnment's plan to obtain the Action Plan for Membership (MAP) in NATO in 2021. NATO had it's 2021 summit in Busseles this very month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations#Ukrainian_bid_to_join_the_NATO_Membership_Action_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93NATO_relations...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

paganel 5y ago

The port of Odessa is already pretty damn close to Sevastopol, I'd gather the Americans would see two Russian warships stationed in the port of Havana as practically being stationed in Miami or Key West. It's too bad that the Montreux Treaty doesn't mean anything anymore and that things got to escalate this far (I live very close to where all this is happening and it kind of makes me very nervous).

petre 5y ago
Except Sevastopol is in Crimea which is internationally recognized as being part of Ukraine, not Russia. Gdansk is also basically a stick's throw from Kalinigrad. The presence of NATO forces in the ports of Odessa, Constanta or Varna would improve the balance of power in the Black Sea, which would otherwise become a Russian lake now that Turkey has its own agenda and it's not such a reliable partner as it was in the past.
- pirate787 5y ago
  Crimea is ethnically Russian and was only part of Ukraine as an accident of Soviet political history.
  - sgc 5y ago
    Oh, all good then. Nothing to see here.
  - thinkcontext 5y ago
    And Russia agreed to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine giving up nuclear weapons.
    - 0x737368 5y ago
      Surely that changes when the government of a country has shifted to an aggressively anti-Russian one which will threaten one of your country's few naval ports and will likely welcome American military bases with open arms. Or should Russia just bend the knee to the US overlords and be a good lapdog?

Aerroon 5y ago

It still surprises me just how much information is out there on the internet. I wonder how much you could track military movements by simply monitoring publicly available webcams. Anyone can see exactly when these two warships leave port by watching the webcam.