A collision without fatal consequences, which occurred in late 2020 in the North Atlantic in international waters between a British military ship and a Russian nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine, was unveiled yesterday by the UK media and confirmed today by the ministry. of the London Defense. The protagonists were Northumberland, a frigate of the Royal Navy, and an unknown unit of the Moscow navy that the former was trying to intercept and remove north of Scotland. According to London’s reconstruction of the episode – partly filmed by a television crew at the time shooting a documentary in images now shown on a Channel 5 program – Her Majesty’s ship had gone into action after a helicopter had identified the periscope of the submarine, surfaced in the area, and after the latter had re-submerged.
To attempt the pursuit, Northumberland had launched a hydrophone, a submarine hearing sensitive sonar in the form of a tube that stretches behind the ship for hundreds of meters, but had been forced to desist when the trawling equipment was finally hit and damaged by the Russian vessel, and returned to a Scottish base for repairs.
The Ministry of Defense has specified that it does not know whether the Moscow submarine, which quickly disappeared, suffered damage itself and which ones. While he called “unlikely” the hypothesis that the collision – traumatic and dangerous even for the crew of the submarine itself, in theory – could have been deliberate. No comments from Moscow for now.