this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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101
UK and Norway team up to hunt Russian submarines and undersea sabotage (www.thebarentsobserver.com)
submitted 5 hours ago by Sepia@mander.xyz to c/europe@feddit.org
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The partnership is designed to protect undersea oil and gas pipelines, as well as cables for data traffic.

Both navies will operate as one – sharing maintenance facilities, technology and equipment to create truly interchangeable forces able to deploy rapidly wherever needed, the British Ministry of Defence said in a press release.

This is the most comprehensive defence agreement in modern times, the Norwegian Ministry of Defence added as the deal was sign by Defence Secretary John Healey and his Norwegian counterpart Tore O. Sandvik at 10 Downing Street on December 4.

"The British presence in the High North plays a crucial role in safeguarding Norwegian and European security," Prime Minister Jonas Gahr StΓΈre said after he met his British colleague Keir Starmer in London.

The two prime ministers then flew north to the Royal Airforce base Lossiemouth in Moray, Scotland. It is from here British P-8 maritime patrol aircraft are operating when flying missions over the North Sea or further north over the Norwegian and Barents Seas.

...

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[–] jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 21 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Russian u-boats regularly violated Swedish territorial waters. Sweden complained to Russia increasingly persistently as the territorial violations went on. The Russians basically ignored them and continued.

Russian u-boats also went into Finnish territorial waters. The Finns dropped depth charges on them. The Russians complained to the Finns about attacking their boats. The Finns responded by saying, oh, I'm sorry, we were having military exercises. We did not expect anyone to be in that area as that would be illegal. Please make sure you won't go there again because we plan on continuing our exercises. Here is a map. The Russians no longer violate Finnish waters.

What do we all learn from this? Putler is a very simple mafia thug. You don't have civilised conversations with mafia thugs, you punch them in the face. They don't learn any other way.

[–] gian@lemmy.grys.it 13 points 3 hours ago (3 children)

Russian u-boats regularly violated Swedish territorial waters. Sweden complained to Russia increasingly persistently as the territorial violations went on. The Russians basically ignored them and continued.

Is is not Sweden that put an underwater signal saying "this way if you are gay" to deter Russia ?

[–] jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 6 points 2 hours ago

Classy move

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 3 points 1 hour ago

Well I want this to be true

[–] trollercoaster@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 hours ago

Something tells me that writing a similar message on a depth charge and dropping it on the Submarine is a more effective deterrent.

[–] Ozymandias1688@feddit.org 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Are depth charges still a thing? I thought it would all be homing torpedos by now

[–] jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 11 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

A torpedo would've destroyed the boat. They wanted to scare them. I assume they located the u-boat precisely, then set the charges such that no serious damage would be done. The psychological effect on the crew and the show of force was the objective.

It's easy to talk about this in the comfortable West, but to be trapped in a tin can a hundred metres below sea, being shaken thoroughly, alarms blaring, lights flickering, while hearing deafening explosions all around you, is an experience they won't forget quickly.

[–] Ozymandias1688@feddit.org 2 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

Sure, but would modern asw ships even have depth charges on board? I'm curious to know whether they are still issued as kind of "shoot across the bow" equivalent for submarines.

[–] bluGill@fedia.io 1 points 14 minutes ago

They are not that hard to make and you can plan in advance to run 'evercises'. So normaly they might not but when they realize a need they can start putting them in rotation.

[–] jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

Good question. Perhaps it was this ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rauma-class_missile_boat firing this weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elma_ASW-600

Or it was this one, which has a rail for depth charges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamina-class_missile_boat

But I'm not an expert at all. Maybe the reports of "depth charges" was just the journalists not having a good understanding of ASW weapons, just like me

[–] trollercoaster@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

It makes sense to still have some "dumb" unguided weapons as a backup, as homing weapons' sensors can be jammed and fooled to go after decoys, while a depth charge that simply drops down to a given point and blows up cannot be easily interfered with in any meaningful way, you can't even locate it using only passive sensors, because it is virtually noiseless apart from the very brief noise it makes when entering the water.

Also, as someone else mentioned, you can easily fire an unguided weapon in such a way that it deliberately misses the target, as a warning.

[–] Ozymandias1688@feddit.org 2 points 1 hour ago

Very interesting, thanks! Learned something new today!

[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 11 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Glad to hear it!

[–] N0t_5ure@lemmy.world 9 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

It's good to see them waking up the fact that they're effectively already at war with Russia and need to fight back.

[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 5 points 4 hours ago

I'm Danish, so you won't find me disagreeing with you.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

So NATO is bust but Europe is waking up.

Kind of neat IMO.

[–] whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago

yeah I was wondering... why the team up, isn't there like an alliance already to defend territories... NATO is a joke actually, was always all talk in hope that nothing ever really happens

[–] bonenode@piefed.social 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

So you are happy to call out Russia on sabotage and call for destruction and "hunting down" of Russian vessels... but sending troops to Ukraine to maybe put an end to this war is somehow wrong because you'd be attacking Russian troops. Ok.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 3 points 1 hour ago

It's a little weird but not that weird.

You have to understand a) what Putin cares about and b) what the Russian people care about. Putin and Russia essentially believe that Ukraine, or at least the Donbas and Crimea, are and always were part of Russia. They think that the break-up of the Soviet Union was a national shame and in particular that the assignment of the Donbas and Crimea to Ukraine (because they were part of the Ukrainian SSR) in that break-up was wrong. Putin believes this fervently and has made several speeches about it. The Russian people likely feel similarly but less strongly about it.

So placing Western troops in Ukraine or fighting Russia with them is seen in that light - imagine if the US had a civil war again, Texas seceded, and then Russia put troops in Texas.

But this is not the same when a Russian submarine gets depth-charged off the coast of some European country. Putin, and Russia in general, don't have historical, deeply-held revanchist claims about Sweden or the UK or Belgium or wherever.

From the public opinion point of view, this means that Putin can't ignore it as easily if the West supports Ukraine directly by putting troops there. And for Putin himself, that direct intervention is a much more serious challenge to his designs on Ukraine than taking pot-shots at military assets that "accidentally" find themselves violating the borders in sea or air (or on land...) of other sovereign states.