Ships belonging to China and Russia were spotted on September 19 in U.S. territorial waters, less than 100 miles from Alaska. Coast Guard sources confirmed on Monday, September 26, that the enemy craft were sailing as a group through the Bering Sea, “several dozen miles off an Alaskan island.” It was clearly a response to Joe Biden sending U.S. warships through the Taiwan Strait.
Ships threaten US coastline
Enemy ships in U.S. Territorial waters are no accident. While this is the second joint-patrol between Moscow and Beijing in a year, the thing that makes this exercise extra-special is the location it’s being conducted in. Clearly, the move is a diplomatic message to stop playing with fire in Taiwan.
Vlad is unstable as azidoazide azide right now. If you even look at him funny he might go nuclear. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, is looking for revenge over Nancy Pelosi’s little social engineering experiment.
The alert Coast Guard crew of the USCGC Kimball, a Legend-class cutter, detected the “surface action group” and has been monitoring it ever since. They count seven ships, four Russian and three Chinese. The People’s Liberation Army issued a statement noting their navy’s Type 055 destroyer Nanchang, “which the U.S. classifies as a guided-missile cruiser,” sailed “approximately 75 nautical miles north of Kiska Island.”
US patrol spots Chinese, Russian naval ships off Alaskan island | News | Al Jazeera #Alaska #China #Russia #Arctic #USCG https://t.co/4sGpfLCXGb via @AJEnglish
— Loretta Fogg (@coldflyngirl) September 28, 2022
It’s the mirror image of what the U.S. Navy has been doing near disputed islands in the South China Sea and the all through the Taiwan Strait. All the vessels were “in a single formation” as they “operated in the U.S. exclusive economic zone.”
The Chinese and Russians are playing fast and loose with the same international regulations that Joe Biden and Lloyd Austin have been. As Newsweek writes, “the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea grants each coastal state an EEZ—a sovereign right to the area’s maritime resources—of no more than 200 nautical miles from beyond its 12 nautical mile territorial sea.”
As of now, enemy ships are inside our Coast Guard’s 17th District, which “covers more than 3.8 million square miles of ocean around Alaska and in the Arctic.”
Temporary in nature
The Coast Guard’s Kimball gets air support from a C-130 Hercules maritime patrol aircraft which operates out of Air Station Kodiak. They “observed the group until it dispersed.” The trespassing enemy ships sailed through without incident and went on about their business, prompting the Coast Guard to declare the incident “temporary in nature.”
While we were watching closely on top of the water, nobody is really sure what was going on underneath it. What they did isn’t exactly illegal but it does make military types nervous. Some say that’s karma for what we provoked in the first place.
According to Rear Admiral Nathan Moore, “while the formation has operated in accordance with international rules and norms, we will meet presence-with-presence to ensure there are no disruptions to U.S. interests in the maritime environment around Alaska.”
US Coast Guard cutter USCGC Kimball (WMSL-756) encountered three Chinese and four Russian naval vessels in Bering Sea, 75 nautical miles north of Kiska Island, Alaska, Sep. 19, inside US Exclusive Economic Zone.https://t.co/XOzDdp3uyk pic.twitter.com/5iMzUylMuZ
— Ryan Chan 陳家翹 (@ryankakiuchan) September 26, 2022
From photos, the press has determined that the silhouette of one of the ships “resembles that of the Russian Navy’s Udaloy-class destroyer RFS Marshal Shaposhnikov.”
On Friday, Russia’s defense ministry verified that “the Marshal Shaposhnikov was joined by Steregushchiy-class corvettes RFS Aldar Tsydenzhapov, RFS Sovershennyy, RFS Gromky and the sea tanker Pechenga—all part of the Russian Navy’s Pacific Fleet.”
China admits they sent “the Nanchang, the Type 054A frigate Yancheng and the Type 903A replenishment ship Dongpinghu of the PLA Navy’s North Sea Fleet.” China also confirmed the ships were a direct message. “The Chinese navy does not perform ‘far seas‘ patrols off U.S. territory nearly as often as American warships navigate the waters around China, including in the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China seas,” they point out.
