Russian Navy Deployment to Pacfic During G20 Largely Fizzled

In that atmosphere of criticism it was not exactly a coincidence that the Russians dispatched a flotilla of warships toward Australia. And the meaning wasn’t particularly subtle, either.

To be clear, because many press reports have been confused about the specific details, there were actually two small Russian flotillas on maneuvers in the Pacific over the past several weeks.

The first group, which largely stayed within the Philippine Sea, consisted of the Moscow (a Slava-class guided-missile cruiser), and the destroyer Admiral Vinogradov. The second flotilla, which was erroneously said to comprise “four Russian warships,” was the one that attracted so much attention from the Australian media. In reality, that group of ships actually only had two military vessels: the missile cruiser Varyag (also a Slava-class, and the current flagship of the Pacific Fleet), and the destroyer Marshal Shaposhnikov. The other two ships were support vessels—a support tanker and a small tugboat.

Despite all of the headlines that they generated, the Russian ships didn’t really do all that much. The first flotilla conducted some minor live-fire drills during its time in the Philippine Sea, but the second seemed to just steam toward Australia without any other obvious goals.

After being approached by several ships from the Royal Australian Navy, including the frigate Parramatta, the Russians and Australians eventually engaged in some “communications drills.” It’s unclear who first proposed the move, and Australian and Russian media accounts differ slightly in their descriptions. Whoever came up with the idea should be thanked, because even though it was far more of a formality than it was any kind of scheduled military exercise, it allowed everyone to exit the situation with a modicum of grace.

The Russians barely tried to hide their true intentions. Even the official Russian media, which can be very creative in crafting justifications for various kinds of maneuvers of Russia’s armed forces, literally said that Moscow flotilla’s mission was to “show the flag” around the Pacific. That even the state-run media didn’t bother to come up with a legitimate need for the show of force indicates just how naked the grandstanding was in this particular instance. The flotilla was a clumsy way of saying “we’re here, we matter, and you ignore us at your peril”—and it was deliberately timed to generate the maximum possible attention.

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