The naval dockyard had become a graveyard, a resting-place of Soviet submarines at the end of the Cold War. Many were left to rust. Some on the surface, others beneath the waves of the Barents Sea.
On a cliff rising above the bay, there were stony-faced murals of Marx and Lenin, faded by the weather and largely ignored by a new Russian political system that did not care to maintain them.
It was 2007 and I was in northern Russia reporting on the visit of a British government delegation. The UK was providing funds to make the submarines’ ageing nuclear reactors safe and had come to see how the cash was being spent.
The dilapidated submarines were not the navy Vladimir Putin had in mind for Russia’s military future, one in which the Kremlin would once again use its fleets to project power across the world’s oceans. At the time, that vision was less-than-clear to the Western visitors.
Almost two decades later, Russia’s navy is no longer falling apart. Instead, it represents a graver and far more immediate threat: one that is much closer to home.
As Russia’s oil revenues continued to grow in the early Putin era, its defence budget did too. Ukraine dealt a blow to the navy’s prestige with the sinking of the Moskva in 2022, but that incident, and other struggles in the Black Sea, don’t tell the full story.
Michael B Petersen wrote in a 2024 paper that the Russian surface fleet, “often mocked as aged and underperforming, is in fact still capable of sustained global operations”. And Russia ended 2025 boasting that it had “the most modern navy”, with one of Putin’s top defence officials claiming that shipbuilders delivered 19 different vessels that year, “as well as three submarines, including the modern strategic nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine Knyaz Pozharsky”.
Those statements must be seen for their propaganda value, but there’s no denying that Russia’s navy represents a clear danger to the UK, and a massive increase in defence spending set to accompany Russia’s 2027 budget could translate into more assertiveness.
In recent years there have been repeated sightings of Russian naval ships sailing off the UK coast, including near critical infrastructure.
Two incidents this summer show the growing threat from Russia’s increasingly aggressive navy. On 14 June, a Russian frigate, the Admiral Grigorovich, fired warning shots at a British yacht in the Channel. Two days earlier, Royal Marine Commandos boarded and seized a Russian “shadow fleet” oil tanker off the coast.
While the latter wasn’t part of the Russian navy, the Smyrtos – and vessels like it – play a key role in Russia’s economy and Putin’s war machine. They’re called the shadow fleet because they’re often registered under the flags of different countries, but that doesn’t mean Russia’s navy is not watching over them. This could bring more naval vessels closer to our shores.
“Because of the action taken by the UK against the Smyrtos, we’re seeing increased presence of Russian military assets in the English Channel and around these geographic choke points,” Gonzalo Saiz Erausquin, an expert on sanctions enforcement at the Royal United Services Institute, told The i Paper.
Nor is the threat purely military. Many of the shadow fleet vessels are old and, in some cases, of questionable seaworthiness. The grey area of their ownership increases the potential environmental danger. If vessels are Russian owned but sailing under another flag, their insurance would be considered invalid and in the event of an oil spill or another disaster “there will be nobody to pay up, and any affected coastal states will be dealing with the cleanup”, said Erausquin.
In the case of the Channel, that would be us and our nearest neighbours.
So far, Russia’s shadow fleet activity hasn’t been the catalyst for a wider conflict, but Putin has made clear his dismay at efforts by the West to curb this trade. “It’s nothing but piracy and robbery,” Putin said in August on a visit to a Russian naval base. “If this is done, we will be forced to respond in kind.”
Erausquin sees the possibility of more shadow fleet vessels starting to fly the Russian flag, to enjoy the full protection of military escorts, “increasingly risking escalation between the UK and Russia”.
The incident with the yacht this summer was not allowed to escalate. Both London and Moscow sought to play it down, suggesting that Putin understands very well the risk of a wider confrontation if tensions are allowed to go too far.
As always, there is also a propaganda element to such confrontations – a chance for Russia to show it is strong again.
That day at the naval dockyard, we were told we had to agree to our pictures being censored – officially for security reasons, but I suspected partly because they were ashamed of the scenes of dereliction that might appear on Western television screens. That wouldn’t be the case today.
The warning shots fired this June were part of a continuing Kremlin campaign to seek out Western weakness, and a less cautious reaction to a future incident might end very differently. The English Channel is a key shipping lane, with some 500 vessels a day passing through the narrow stretch of water. One miscalculation could lead to a much wider confrontation between Russia and the West.