HMS Defender (D36): The Destroyer That Sailed Past Crimea and Made Headlines Worldwide

Built at Govan

HMS Defender was built by BAE Systems Surface Ships at Govan on the River Clyde, laid down on 31 July 2006, launched on 21 October 2009, and commissioned on 21 March 2013, a Type 45 destroyer displacing between 8,000 and 8,500 tonnes, carrying a crew of 191 with accommodation for up to 235, and capable of speeds in excess of 30 knots.

She was the fifth of the six Type 45 destroyers built and the eighth Royal Navy ship to carry the name Defender, completing her first sea trials in October and November 2011, some sixteen months ahead of formal commissioning.

Eighth of the name is a figure worth unpacking, because the seventh went in a way very few warships have. She was a D-class destroyer, and in the summer of 1941 she was working the Tobruk Ferry: the nightly run along the North African coast by destroyers and small craft to keep the besieged garrison at Tobruk supplied, because the port could not be reached any other way and could not be reached in daylight at all. It was a shuttle service conducted at high speed in the dark by ships that were far too valuable for it, and it went on for months.

Before dawn on 11 July 1941 a single Junkers Ju 88 on a reconnaissance flight along the coast, flown by a pilot named Gerhard Stamp, dropped a bomb that missed her. It went into the water alongside and detonated underneath her, just forward of the engine room. The shock broke her back and flooded the engine room, and it did not kill or injure a single person aboard: not one of the crew and not one of the passengers. HMAS Vendetta put a wire on her and started towing, with a skeleton crew left aboard, and after about five hours it became clear she was coming apart. Vendetta took the last men off and then sank her with a torpedo and gunfire, seven miles north of Sidi Barrani.

All two hundred and seventy-one men aboard reached Alexandria. A destroyer had her back broken by a near miss, was towed for five hours, was scuttled by an Australian ship and went down in sight of the Egyptian coast, and nobody died. Between her and the present ship came one more, the Daring-class Defender of the 1950s, whose career was a great deal quieter and who was broken up at Inverkeithing in 1972. It is a name with a very uneven distribution of incident about it, and the current holder has done rather more than her share.

Escorting the Admiral Kuznetsov

HMS Defender's early career included escorting a Russian task group, including the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, down Scotland's east coast in 2013, a routine piece of shadowing work that Royal Navy vessels carried out regularly as Russian naval activity around British waters increased through the 2010s.

She provided air defence support for the American Carrier Task Force 50 during Operation Shader in 2014, and sailed for the Middle East again in October 2015, joining the French carrier Charles de Gaulle's battle group off Syria that November as an air defence escort for operations against Daesh, before escorting RMS Queen Mary 2 through the Gulf of Oman on 27 April 2016 and seizing hashish and crystal methamphetamine during regional counter-narcotics operations.

A further deployment took her into the Indian Ocean, where on 30 January 2020 she was photographed patrolling as part of Combined Task Force 150, the long-running multinational counter-terrorism and maritime security force, unglamorous but genuinely useful work well away from the headlines her next deployment would attract.

The 2021 Black Sea Incident

HMS Defender's best-known moment came on 23 June 2021, during a passage from Odesa in Ukraine to Batumi in Georgia that took her within around nine kilometres of Cape Fiolent, on Crimea's southwestern tip. Russia had issued a Notice to Mariners shortly beforehand declaring the surrounding waters closed to the normal right of innocent passage, a restriction Britain did not recognise, since it has never accepted Russian sovereignty over Crimea in the first place.

Innocent passage is worth explaining, because the whole episode was a legal argument conducted at twenty knots. Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, every ship has the right to pass through another state's territorial sea, the twelve-mile belt off its coast, provided the passage is continuous, expeditious and not prejudicial to the peace and good order of the coastal state. Warships are explicitly included. No permission is needed and no notification is required, and the convention sets out an exhaustive list of the things that would make a passage something other than innocent: launching aircraft, collecting intelligence, exercising with weapons, and so on. Sailing straight through on a direct course between two ports is not on the list.

Two things follow from that, and they are why the Royal Navy went where it went. The first is that Russia had issued a notice on 14 April 2021 purporting to suspend innocent passage by foreign warships around Crimea for six months. A coastal state may suspend innocent passage temporarily, in a specified area, where it is essential for security and where the suspension does not discriminate; a blanket six-month ban on the warships of other countries is none of those things. The second is that a warship is sovereign territory. If a coastal state believes a warship is not making an innocent passage, the only remedies available to it, short of genuine self-defence, are to ask her to leave and then to lodge a diplomatic protest. Firing at her is not on the list either.

Russian military and border guard forces claimed to have fired warning shots and dropped bombs from a Sukhoi Su-24 attack aircraft after HMS Defender allegedly strayed roughly three kilometres into Russian-claimed waters off Crimea for around twenty minutes, territory Russia had annexed from Ukraine in 2014 but which remains internationally recognised as Ukrainian.

The British government firmly denied that any warning shots had been fired, insisting instead that HMS Defender had been engaged in what international law calls innocent passage through Ukraine's own territorial waters, a right any vessel is entitled to exercise.

British officials later clarified that heavy gunfire had in fact occurred, but well astern of the ship, some three miles away, and could not reasonably be characterised as warning shots directed at HMS Defender herself.

Jonathan Beale, the BBC's defence correspondent who was aboard the ship at the time, independently confirmed that the crew went to action stations and donned flash protection gear, and that they were warned by radio that Russian forces intended to fire, subsequently hearing gunfire in the distance, a properly tense episode regardless of exactly how close any of it came to HMS Defender herself.

Legal scholars spent weeks afterwards picking through the wreckage of two flatly contradictory official accounts. Dr David Turns of Cranfield University summed up the difficulty neatly, noting that misinformation and mutual denial were only to be expected from both sides, and that whether live fire and bombs had genuinely been aimed at the ship depended almost entirely on whose version one chose to believe.

There is one more layer of irony in it. The principle Russia was denying, that warships need neither permission nor prior notice, was one the Soviet Union itself signed up to in terms: the 1989 Joint Statement on the Uniform Interpretation of Rules of International Law Governing Innocent Passage, agreed with the United States at Jackson Hole and still on the books. And the reason Britain chose the direct route past Cape Fiolent rather than going the long way round was precisely that going the long way round would have been an admission. A course drawn to avoid Crimean waters is a course that concedes they are Russian. Defender was not lost, and she was not being provocative in the schoolboy sense; she was drawing a line on a chart that the Foreign Office wanted drawn.

The incident gained an unusual coda on 27 June 2021, when around fifty pages of classified Ministry of Defence documents turned up in a soggy heap behind a bus stop in Kent, found by a member of the public who handed them straight to the BBC. Among them was a paper discussing the transit and anticipated Russian reactions to it, marked 'Secret: UK Eyes Only'; the same bundle, oddly, also included unrelated papers on a possible British military presence in Afghanistan. Junior Defence Minister Jeremy Quin told Parliament the government was 'deeply sorry', a remarkable security lapse that generated almost as much attention as the original naval encounter itself.

A New Chapter

As of July 2023, HMS Defender began a three-year refit involving engine upgrades, integration of the Sea Ceptor missile system, and incorporation of the Naval Strike Missile, a substantial modernisation intended to keep her particularly capable well into the following decade, work that will hopefully return her to service equipped for whatever the next chapter of her career, diplomatically fraught or otherwise, happens to demand.

The work, part of a wider £160 million alliance contract between BAE Systems, Cammell Laird and BMT first signed in 2018, makes Defender the first Type 45 to receive Sea Ceptor: a 24-cell missile silo, built ashore as a complete unit before being craned into the hull, sits behind her existing 48-cell Sea Viper system for a fifty percent increase in embarked anti-air missiles, while two of her original generators are being swapped for three larger diesel units, at a cost of some £68 million for this ship alone. The government had given late summer 2026 as the target completion date, but by September 2026 she was still in the middle of her refit and not expected to rejoin the fleet until 2027, so whatever the next chapter of her career happens to demand will have to wait a little longer.

The two weapons in that refit are both worth a line, because between them they change what a Type 45 is for. The Sea Ceptor silo is the class-wide programme that raises each destroyer from forty-eight missiles to seventy-two and gives her a cheap inner-layer weapon suitable for shooting down drones, and the reasoning behind it, worked out the hard way in the Red Sea, is set out in the article on HMS Diamond (D34). Defender is the first ship of the six to get it.

The Naval Strike Missile is the other half, and it is arguably the bigger change. Until 2023 the Royal Navy's anti-ship weapon was Harpoon, a design of the 1970s that had been life-extended past the point of embarrassment and then withdrawn with no replacement at all, leaving British frigates and destroyers with no way of sinking another warship beyond gun range. The Norwegian-built NSM went to sea in HMS Somerset (F82) first, in January 2023, under a programme to fit eleven ships. So Defender will come out of her Portsmouth refit with half again as many air defence missiles and, for the first time, a modern anti-ship missile to go with them.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.