Russian fleet, including sole aircraft carrier, steams towards Syria carrying warplanes
Russian warships, including its sole aircraft carrier, are steaming towards Syria carrying fighter bombers that are likely to reinforce a final assault on the besieged city of Aleppo, a senior Nato diplomat said, citing Western intelligence.
The fleet passed by the Norwegian city of Bergen on Wednesday, the diplomat said, while Russian media has said it will move through the English Channel, past Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean Sea to the Syrian coast.
“They are deploying all of the Northern fleet and much of the Baltic fleet in the largest surface deployment since the end of the Cold War,” the diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
“This is not a friendly port call. In two weeks, we will see a crescendo of air attacks on Aleppo as part of Russia’s strategy to declare victory there,” the diplomat said.
Russia, which supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with an air campaign against the Western rebels in the devastated eastern part of Aleppo, has said the deployment will target Islamic State militants in Syria.
But the Nato diplomat said the additional military firepower was designed to drive out or destroy the 8,000 rebels in Aleppo, the only large city still in opposition hands, and allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to start a withdrawal.
An intensified air campaign in eastern Aleppo, where 275,000 people are trapped, would further worsen ties between Moscow and the West, which says the Kremlin may be responsible for war crimes.
Nato officials also say that strategically, Russia’s air strikes are securing its interests by protecting Assad and Russia’s Syrian port in Tartous, which boosts its access to the Black Sea that it controls after taking the Crimean peninsula.
The fleet off Norway includes Russia’s only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, which is carrying jet fighters, and the Soviet-era nuclear-powered battle cruiser Pyotr Velikiy, or Peter the Great. Other Russian vessels in the group include the anti-submarine warships of the Severomorsk and Vice-Admiral Kulakov and support ships, Russian media has reported.
Major Elisabeth Eikeland, spokeswoman of the National Joint Headquarters in the Norwegian army, said of the warships: “We have been informed that they are en route to the Mediterranean.
“It’s not every day that so many ships sail together off Norway,” she said.
The Russian jets are some of the latest models in Russia’s entire inventory, according to Russian state-run media. The bombs they carry will be guided, a sharp departure from Russia’s usual indiscriminate use of “dumb” or unguided munitions which can drift unpredictably when dropped from altitude.
Russian media quotes a military source as saying that with the new X-38 guided bombs, “we reinforce our aviation group and bring in completely new means of destruction to the region.” The same report states the bombs are accurate to within a few metres.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse and Business Insider
