Paris: Russian warplanes harass French warships off Syrian coast
Chief of Staff of the French Navy, Admiral Christophe Prazuck, reported that Russian Military aircrafts have approached French warships eight times “over the past eight months.”
Agence France-Presse quoted this information from Prazuck, who spoke before the Senate’s international and security commission on April 11.
The Admiral noted that the French frigate has been located off the coast of Syria since 2015. He added that at the beginning of April 2018, the French warship Aquitaine was approached “at an unsafe distance by a Russian fighter that flew from the Tartus’s base.”
The Admiral believes these actions “could have caused an incident.”
According to the agency’s military source, after this incident, “the crew of the ship was forced to remind the Russian aircraft about the ‘rules of approach.’”
Admiral Prazuck emphasized that the naval and strategic status of Russia and China has increased in recent years. “China has created a fleet equivalent to the French Navy within four years, and Russia has increased its number of submarines by 1.5 times,” he stated. “Thus, the naval and strategic position of these countries has changed in recent years.