London:
Britain’s government stated Sunday it was investigating how secret defence documents, outlining the movements of a warship that led to Russia firing warning shots off the Crimean coast, had been discovered at a bus cease in England.
The Ministry of Defence stated that an employee told it last week that the documents had been lost, and that an investigation had been launched.
“It shouldn’t be able to happen,” Brandon Lewis, minister for Northern Ireland, told Sky News on Sunday.
“It was properly reported at the time… there’s an internal investigation into that situation.”
An anonymous member of the public told the BBC they discovered 50 pages of classified facts behind a bus cease in Kent, southern England, on Tuesday.
The papers discussed the probable Russian reaction to Britain’s HMS Defender travelling by means of Ukrainian waters off the coast of Crimea on Wednesday, the BBC reported.
Russia on Wednesday stated it fired warning shots at the navy destroyer in the Black Sea right after what it stated was a violation of its territorial waters.
Britain, having said that, stated it was generating “an innocent passage through Ukrainian territorial waters in accordance with international law.”
According to Moscow, the incident took spot off the coast of Cape Fiolent on Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 in a move that the vast majority of the international neighborhood has not recognised.
The documents seem to show that the British officials knew the route could lead to a probable reaction from the Russians, but that taking an option passage could be deemed by Moscow as “the UK being scared/running away”.
The route it did take would as an alternative “provide an opportunity to engage with the Ukrainian government… in what the UK recognises as Ukrainian territorial waters,” stated one more document.
Russia’s foreign ministry on Thursday summoned the British ambassador to “strongly protest” the incident.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov described it as a “deliberate and prepared provocation”.
Russia’s defence ministry stated warning shots had been fired and bombs dropped along the path of the HMS Defender.
Among the other documents discovered at the bus cease had been these that laid out plans for probable British military presence in Afghanistan right after the finish of NATO operations there.
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