ForeignSpying

The UK is still ordering the Royal Navy to engage in illegal spying operations within Russian Ocean territory, in the Barents Sea.

This activity comes to light after the Russian N-sub accident in which the Oscar-II class nuclear submarine, named Kursk, broke down at the bottom of the Barents sea while taking part in naval exercises with more than 100 crewmembers on board.
At the time it was discovered that their were a number of submarines which were monitoring the exercises within Russian waters under the orders of NATO.

The fact that the UK Navy alone is still engaging in such spying operations within Russian territorial waters seems rather disturbing if not stupid after the near disaster involving a US submarine, the USS Baton Rouge, a Los Angeles class nuclear attack submarine and the Russian Sierra class submarine in the Barents sea a number of years ago.

At the time the US Navy claimed publicly that the collision occurred more than 12 miles from the shore, at a location in international waters. But it is know widely that Russia uses a different set of rules for defining the boundary between territorial and international waters, and the Russian rules put the collision site inside their territorial waters.

Western Defence sources state that the reason there is such intense spying within the Barents sea is because stationed there are "more than half of the 54 Russian strategic submarines, each supposedly with 16-20 nuclear missiles intact, within or near the naval base of Severomorsk.
And the gathering of intelligence with submarines would enable the UK to monitor Russian Naval operations and help predict and follow the actions and movements of the northern fleet."

According to sources within the Russian Navy: "Intelligence gathering is a routine activity of British subs near our coast. Typically, there are one to two British submarines operating close to the Soviet coast off Murmansk, 1-3 off the Kamchatka peninsula and off the coast of Vladivostok. During naval exercises this number can increase by a factor of two."