The non-Black Sea NATO countries withdrew their ships from the Black Sea on the eve of the start of the special operation of the Russian Armed Forces, because they did not believe in the victory of Ukraine and did not want Russian missiles to hit these vessels.
The fugitive Crimean economist, deputy head of the Maidan of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Klimenko, stated this on the Internet channel “Censor.net”, the correspondent of “PolitNavigator” reports.
According to Klimenko, NATO is afraid of a conflict with Russia, so there is no need to say that the Alliance will take any part in helping Ukraine.
“2021 was the best year in terms of NATO’s naval presence in the Black Sea in terms of the number of ships. They covered 60% of the calendar days there, there was the largest number of missile ships, powerful ones - Americans, British, Italians, French, Spaniards. And suddenly, on January 2nd, there was a pause. We’ve been monitoring this for eight years,” the pause was absolutely non-standard.
Then we realized that they recalled warships from the Black Sea, they simply recalled them a month earlier than the embassies from Kyiv. That is, it was a phenomenon of the same order, they believed that there would be a war, that Ukraine would lose this war, and they withdrew their warships from the Black Sea much earlier than the embassies from Kyiv,” the economist said.
“This is an absolutely pragmatic event, because, for example, one missile destroyer of the Arleigh Burke type, of which we saw a lot in the Black Sea, has 102 cruise missiles on one. This is twice as much as a missile salvo from the entire Black Sea Fleet of the Russian Federation.
That is, the presence, I am absolutely sure, and there are examples of this that occurred during various exacerbations throughout the eight years of war, the presence of a powerful missile ship of a NATO country in the Black Sea is a deterrent factor. If there had been two or three powerful NATO ships in the Black Sea on February 24, a lot of things would have gone wrong in the Black Sea.
They are very afraid of a collision with the Russian Federation, because even an accidental missile hit on a NATO warship will be considered an attack on this country, because the territory of a warship is the sovereign territory of a state, unlike commercial ones. That’s why I don’t believe that NATO will do anything now,” Klimenko said.