A grain ship is hit in the Black Sea. A US sub is spotted 5,000 miles away. Coincidence?

The numbers of Bear-F/J (Tu-142) and May (Il-38), Russia’s submarine-hunting maritime surveillance aircraft, are even lower. Russia needs these planes in its Northern and Pacific fleets so that it can operate effectively against US and allied nuclear subs and – it hopes – prevent its nuclear deterrent subs being followed: it cannot normally spare any maritime planes for its Black Sea fleet. Tu-142s were sent to the Black Sea for a period in 2021, before the wider war there broke out, but none are permanently assigned.

This matters, because the other thing a maritime plane has apart from sonobuoys, magnetic detectors and weapons is a long-ranging radar specifically designed for tracking ships on the surface. A properly equipped maritime plane at high altitude can track ships from hundreds of miles away. British intelligence reported last year that the only maritime aircraft available to the Black Sea fleet were ancient Beriev flying boats, largely useless for this sort of thing.

Russian warships are now largely cowering in the eastern Black Sea, so aircraft are the only way to locate and track ships in the west. Russia has various weapons which can be launched to attack such ships from far away, but the ships must first be located and tracked. Russia is very keen to do this so as to prevent Ukrainian grain being shipped from western ports such as Odesa to the safe corridor down through Romanian, Bulgarian and Turkish waters (all Nato) to the world’s oceans.

This was shown on 11 September when a Backfire bomber launched a Kitchen (AS-4) anti-ship missile at the MV Aya in the western Black Sea carrying 26,550 tons of wheat destined for Egypt.

Given the probable absence of any proper ship-tracking planes, this Russian solution was most likely rather cobbled together.

Early tracking would have been a combination of human intelligence, satellite pictures or Automatic Identification System (AIS) data from the ship which would let the Russians know it was departing from harbour. This might then be correlated with whatever the Polsodnukh radar in Crimea may possibly have been seeing. The Polsodnukh radar is an “over-the-horizon” ground-mounted system and therefore will range in capability from highly unreliable to mythical, but it might have produced something. Whatever the Russians had could then be further merged with the now airborne Backfire’s own radar picture.

However it was done the Russians generated a good enough idea where the grain ship was – or a grain ship was – to fire a Kitchen and let it guide itself the final part of the way with its own radar.

But this is not a precise or elegant targeting solution. In fact, it’s the sort of attack that on another day results in hitting a ship inside Romanian territorial waters by mistake. If you have seen what missile seeker head returns look like you will know that relying on that to distinguish between just an act of war against Ukraine and triggering a Nato Article V response is a bad idea. But Russia is desperate to do something about Ukrainian grain exports – maybe the date was relevant – and they took the risk.

As an alternative to this scenario, the Black Sea fleet may have been lent one or more Bear F/J or May temporarily, so that they had good targeting data for the Backfire to use. But such loans are less likely while Putin’s Pacific fleet needs to respond to events in the Bering Strait and his Northern fleet must keep the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap covered.

It’s an elastic connection, but US submarine movements thousands of miles away most definitely have an impact on Russian air-sea power in the western Black Sea.

It would be entirely speculative of me to wonder if one of the ripple effects of the successful grain ship strike was Russia being deliberately allowed to get an idea as to when and where a US sub might be moving through the Bering just days later. That would create a need for Bear F/Js and Mays far from the Black Sea, and so lower the chance of more grain ships being hit. If you were heading up there anyway, why wouldn’t you?

Western navies are, after all, constantly bedevilled by sub-threshold or ‘grey-zone’ activities that pull our scarce resources out of shape. Houthi activities in the Southern Red Sea are the most obvious example.

It would be nice to think that Putin and his Iranian allies are having such methods used on them, for a change.