DISINFO: BBC reporter aboard HMS Defender revealed incident in Russian waters was a deliberate act
SUMMARY
A BBC journalist made a call aboard the British ship that entered Russian territorial waters in the Black Sea on Wednesday and confirmed the warnings of the Russian patrol boats amid the noise generated by the Russian planes flying over the British ship. The reporter revealed that their transit was a "deliberate act of following a recognised international shipping route" from Ukraine to Georgia.
RESPONSE
This is a distortion of the report of the BBC journalist aboard the British destroyer HMS Defender, defence correspondent Jonathan Beale, as part of a disinformation campaign about the incident near Crimea’s coasts on 23 June 2021. As can be seen in his original reporting, he uttered the term “deliberate” in a different context to the one portrayed here. His exact words were: “HMS Defender is going to sail within what Russia now claims as its territorial waters, but following a legally recognised shipping lane”. In a written addendum to the story on the BBC website, Beale stated: “This would be a deliberate move to make a point to Russia”. In this disinformation piece, these two sentences are merged and the nuances are purposefully ignored in order to present the incident as a British provocation, in line with the statements of Russian top officials.
Given that Russia’s annexation of Crimea is internationally considered as illegal, the affirmation that the vessel “entered Russian territorial waters in the Black Sea” is also false.
See other examples of disinformation about the HMS Defender incident, such as the claim that UK destroyer’s passage near Crimea violated international law, that its presence in the Black Sea was a NATO provocation or that the UK wanted Russia to shoot at the vessel.