A team of Navy experts had been running a high-stakes “round the clock” operation to track a Russian warship before it fired warning shots over a British yacht in the Channel this week.
For at least two months, the Navy has been hunting the Admiral Grigorovich “24/7” with a range of patrol vessels and frigates, alongside P-8 RAF jets. In April alone, more than 250 Navy personnel were involved in the mission.
The Kremlin warship’s exact location is not known but it is currently being shadowed by Britain’s HMS Mersey, with an additional team monitoring its movements from land, The i Paper understands. Publicly-available maritime tracking data showed the Mersey to be anchored in the North Sea on Thursday, between England and Belgium.
The Grigorovich has been acting as a taxi service for other Russian vessels passing through the Channel, sources close to the monitoring mission told The i Paper.
Mostly, it has been “loitering” around the Suffolk coast before picking up other ships. The i Paper previously tracked it 30 miles off the UK coast, close to an offshore wind farm that powers more than 400,000 homes in Britain.
“She does not roam around freely,” one insider said. “We constantly track her behaviour and her movements. Offshore patrol vessels monitor her every move, and the analysts are all over it.
“As an island nation, it’s a round the clock job to monitor Russian military activity in and around our waters. When she’s in our backyard, we always monitor.”
The Grigorovich’s current location is not publicly visible, with its Automatic Identification System (AIS) – a maritime tracking and communication system – having been turned off.
However, those close to the operation said that it is not believed to have come close to any other British assets since Tuesday’s incident, which took place outside of British territorial waters.
Bright Future during a race round the Isle of Wight. The yacht encountered Kremlin frigate Admiral Grigorovich in the English Channel this week (Photo: MoD via Getty)Tracking is being carried out in partnership with the UK’s allies, including the French and Belgian authorities, and the wider Nato military alliance. Different countries take the lead for monitoring the Grigorovich depending on whose water she is most proximate to, and the UK is currently heading the response.
It is not yet clear what the Grigorovich was doing in the Channel when it came across the 40ft British sailing yacht. However, the frigate is believed to have previously escorted shadow fleet vessels – ships which travel covertly, often under another country’s flag, carrying sanctioned Russian oil or kit – through the Channel.
A 700-strong shadow fleet is responsible for carrying 75 per cent of Russia’s sanctioned oil which directly funds attacks in Ukraine, according to the UK Government.
The Russian defence ministry said the Grigorovich’s crew had made several attempts to contact the yacht and acted in “strict accordance with international shipping regulations”, but the Sir Keir Starmer called the incident “reckless” and came against a background of “clear Russian aggression” across Europe.
Warning shots were ‘totally unnecessary’
The retired British couple who were sailing the yacht, Jane and Alan Kelvey, told The i Paper they had been sailing from the south coast of England to northern France when it came within 500 yards of the Russian frigate and the warning shots were fired shortly after 11am on Tuesday.
Describing the encounter, Mrs Kelvey said: “We could see the ship in the distance with what looked like Cyrillic writing on the side. We heard five blasts on their horn, as a warning.
“We weren’t moving towards them – we were at a safe distance. But we began pulling further away from them.
“We heard another five blasts on the horn as a warning. Then we heard four or five gun shots.”
Mrs Kelvey said the shots were not directed at the yacht but that they were “totally unnecessary”, and that no radio contact had been received from the Grigorovich.
Steve Prest, a retired Royal Navy commodore who is now an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) said that the incident may have resulted from a “commanding officer of a warship getting a bit nervous that a vessel was getting too close” and trying to warn them off.
But Prest said that in the context of Russian shadow fleet activities and the Royal Marines operation to board an oil tanker accused of violating sanctions on Sunday, the incident carried greater significance.
“The Russians very rarely will do something like this in an uncalculated haphazard way. I think what they’re doing is baring their teeth,” he said. “If there are other ships preparing to come through the English Channel, I think this is a message to say, hey, look, ‘we are here, we are serious and we are prepared to stand our ground so let’s not have any miscalculation’.”
There would be a greater risk of escalation if the ship that was the target of the warning shots was another military vessel, Prest said, asking: “What happens next if they’re both not prepared to change course and they both then escalate?”
When tensions could escalate
In June 2021, the HMS Defender destroyer was involved in an incident while conducting a “freedom of navigation patrol” through the disputed waters around the Crimean Peninsula, in which Russia said warning shots were fired from a coast guard patrol vessel and that bombs were dropped in the British ship’s path in response to it straying into its territorial waters.
But the British military denied the account, saying the Defender had been in Ukrainian territorial waters and heavy guns were fired three miles astern that could not be considered to be warning shots.
Britain’s RFA Tideforce, in the background, monitoring the Admiral Grigorovich in April (Photo: Royal Navy/AFP)In March, Starmer gave British forces the authority to capture Russian shadow fleet vessels. The Prime Minister said at the time that Vladimir Putin was likely “rubbing his hands” over the sharp rise in oil prices driven by the US-Israeli war with Iran, which will make his exports considerably more lucrative.
While experts say the primary use of the shadow fleet is to continue the international sale of Russian oil, there are concerns the vessels can be used for functions that pose a threat to national security.
Authorities in Finland have charged officers at the helm of a shadow fleet tanker of damaging undersea electricity and telecommunications cables by dragging its anchor along the seabed in December 2024. When the French military seized another sanctioned oil tanker last October, there were suspicions that the ship had been the launchpad for drones that forced the closure of airports across Denmark days earlier.
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