At the end of October, one of the Russian navy’s main battleships, a guided-missile destroyer called the Smetlivy, set out from its homeport in Crimea and headed west through the Black Sea and into the Aegean. It had two stops to make. The first was in Greece—a member of NATO and the European Union—where the ship was invited to a maritime festival as part of the Greek-Russian Year of Culture. From there it sailed on toward the Mediterranean to join the Russian naval group involved in the bombardment of Syria.
The journey would, in other times, have caused a scandal in …read more
Source: Time
