US sends destroyers to track Russian nuclear sub and warship

The US Navy dispatched ships and aircraft to track Russian warships that sailed just 25 miles off the South Florida coast yesterday en route to Cuba. Vladimir Putin's most modern frigate Admiral Gorshkov, a hypersonic missile carrier, was accompanying nuclear submarine Kazan and two other naval vessels in the Atlantic for drills involving the use of high precision weapons, Russia 's defence ministry said yesterday.

All four vessels arrive in Havana today ahead of a series of extensive aerial and naval exercises, according to the ministry - the first of their kind in five years in the Caribbean. But their proximity to American shores prompted US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to deploy three destroyers - USS Truxtun, USS Donald Cook and USS Delbert D. Black - and a submarine reconnaissance aircraft to keep tabs on the Russian vessels.

The Kremlin's decision to send its heavily armed flotilla so close to Florida is seen in the West as unnecessary power projection at a time of deep tension over Putin's war in Ukraine, with East-West relations at the lowest point since the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis. 

Besides the three US destroyers, NORTHCOM also dispatched a Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, which OSINT analysts said last night was monitoring an area of sea roughly equidistant between the US and Bahamas - likely the location of Putin's warships.

Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Ville de Quebec also joined the US flotilla in its tracking operation to ensure the Russian flotilla continued onto Cuba without issue. Russia's defence ministry did not state what firepower the vessels were carrying, though Cuban officials denied the Russian vessels are carrying nuclear missiles.

Russian pro-war Telegram channels boasted that nuclear submarine Kazan has 'guided missile weapons' on board. The Admiral Gorshkov meanwhile carries a battery of Putin's fearsome Zircon hypersonic missiles, and both vessels are seen as key players in Moscow's nuclear strike force. The other two Russian vessels headed for Cuba are the tanker Pashin and the rescue tug Nikolay Chiker.

During the Russian war games in the Atlantic, the Admiral Gorshkov 'defended Northern Fleet ships from air raids and anti-ship missiles of the conditional enemy', the Russian defence ministry said, These exercises were conducted with the help of computer simulation, as mock targets were hit with the Poliment-Redut SAM system, A-192M shipboard artillery system and Palash anti-aircraft system.

Russian press said that in passing so close to American shores, Putin's ships were simply 'giving the US a taste of its own medicine' as analysts pointed out that as many as 50 NATO ships are currently performing major exercises in the Baltic Sea as part of the BALTOPS 24 military drills. Russia and Cuba previously announced that Moscow's vessels would be conducting drills off the coast of Havana from 12 to 17 June.

The two countries have shared close ties since the days of the Soviet Union, first establishing their diplomatic ties after the 1959 Cuban Revolution. As communist states, Cuba and the USSR were seen as the antithesis to capitalist America at the time, when Washington and Moscow were engaged in the Cold War.

In 1961, the US led a failed attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow its government (known as the Bay of Pigs invasion) - deepening the rift further between the US, the USSR and the Cuban government. Relations deteriorated further still during the Cuban missile crisis - a 13-day standoff between the US and the Soviet Union in October 1962. The crisis saw the American deployment of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear weapons in Cuba.

The crisis is widely seen as the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-blown nuclear war, and perhaps the closest the world has come to total nuclear annihilation. Since then, the relationship between the US and Cuba has softened. Diplomatic relations, having been cut off in 1961, were restored for the first time on July 20, 2015, and each country has an embassy in their respective capitals. The US continues to maintain a commercial, economic and financial embargo on Cuba, making it illegal for US corporations to do business with the country.

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