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.
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 genuinely 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 deployed to the Middle East between 2015 and 2016, escorting RMS Queen Mary 2 through the Gulf of Oman and seizing hashish and crystal methamphetamine during regional counter-narcotics operations.
The 2021 Black Sea Incident
HMS Defender's best-known moment came on 23 June 2021, during a passage through the Black Sea. 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 genuinely tense episode regardless of exactly how close any of it came to HMS Defender herself.
The incident gained an unusual coda on 27 June 2021, when classified Ministry of Defence documents discussing the transit and anticipated Russian reactions to it were found abandoned at a bus stop in Kent, a genuinely 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 genuinely 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.