Turkey This Saturday has momentarily closed freighter traffic through the Bosphorus to recover and investigate a floating object suspected of being a sea mine from the coast of Ukraine.
“On the morning of March 26, a commercial civilian ship detected in the waters of the Bosphorus a mine-like object and a team of scuba divers has immediately moved to the scene,” he reported on the network. Twitter the Ministry of Defence Turkish.
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“This mine-like object was recovered by the team of divers and a procedure has been started to neutralize it,” the statement concludes, without clarifying whether it was really an explosive device or not.
The Turkish private network NTV assured shortly after that “according to the first investigations it is an old model Russian mine”, referring to a floating round object with protrusions.
During the operation, the authorities closed freighter traffic through the Bosphorus in both directions, adds the aforementioned chain, specifying that the supposed mine was in the district of Sariyerwhere he Bosphorus connect with him Black Sea.
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Last Monday, the Turkish authorities warned about the possibility that sea currents could carry some of the sea mines that were part of the defense of the Ukrainian city of Odessa against Russian attacks and believed to have been torn from their anchors by a storm.
As well Bulgaria issued a similar warning, although experts consulted by EFE indicated that the mines could arrive towards the end of the month.
A “cheap” defense system
Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the insistence on controlling the entire coast of the Black Seathe Ukrainian defense, apparently only has two ways to “push out” the Russian fleet.
The first was proposed by the president Volodimir Zelensky even before the invasion and was to expand the mission of the OTAN at Black Seawhich would be enough to repel the Russian ships, but that option has vanished in the face of the refusal of the Atlantic Alliance to intervene.
The cost of the mine is US$30 and the cost of repairing the cruiser is US$24 million.
A second efficient and cheap option that would ultimately have been used by the Ukrainian defense would be sea mines. Given the military inferiority of Ukraine against Russia in the Black Seathis ancient defense system was the most viable to protect coastal cities from Russian landings.
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