The Royal Canadian Navy now finds itself in the unusual position of both shadowing Russian warships as a threat in the Caribbean and sharing an anchorage with them as a guest in the port of Havana — because Canada accepted an invitation to send a patrol ship to Cuba while the Russian navy is in town.
And it’s not clear just who in government or the military knew about the invitation from Cuba. The Caribbean nation has been a full-throated supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine and Cubans have been fighting alongside Russian soldiers in that country.
A spokesperson for the Department of National Defence (DND) told CBC News on Friday that the department was aware the Russians would be in Havana port on the same days as the Canadians.
But when asked about the visit on CBC’s Power and Politics on Thursday evening, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly told host David Cochrane she knew nothing about it.
In the “show of strength” column, one also notes that unlike the Russian contingent, the Canadian warship (the HMCS Margaret Brooke, apparently) is not traveling in the company of an ocean-going tug (the Nikolay Chiker) to address the possibility that it breaks down and has to be towed back.
I don’t think that this is protecting it from Ukrainian attack, though. The Black Sea Fleet is the one at risk there. This will be from the Russian (kagis for Admiral Gorshkov) Northern Fleet, their Arctic ships.
Actually, the Northern Fleet is the one that the Canadians actually are most-likely to be the ones to have to pay attention to. The US can sail submarines under the icepack, but has very limited icebreaker capacity, can’t operate much by way of surface ships in the Arctic. That’s mostly on the Canucks and the Norwegians, as things stand.
EDIT: Apparently that might actually be a Ukrainian attack. I was in a conversation on this in [email protected] the other day. Apparently, in the Soviet Union, Ukraine built all the big gas turbine engines for warships. (The Admiral Gorshkov uses a gas turbine engine.) Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and Ukraine decided that they weren’t going to be selling Russia any replacements or spare parts as long as that was going on. Russia built a gas turbine factory, UEC Saturn, but it’s very constrained in capacity, can’t produce new stuff at the rate Russia needs them, so it sounds like Russia is probably running engines longer than they’re supposed to be run.
On top of that, Canada is not exactly the naval power of the U.S. or Britain or France or even Australia, but they’re still clearly not especially intimidated by the so-called powerful Russian navy.