From a geopolitical point of view, the Black Sea coast is the "soft underbelly" of Russia, approaching which the enemy can strike at the largest cities and defense centers of our country, military historian Dmitry Boltenkov writes in Izvestia.
The author appreciated the first visit to the Black Sea in the last five years by the American staff ship Mount Whitney together with the destroyer Porter and the tanker John Lenthall.
"On such a ship, a lot of means of various types of radio communication are installed, there are rooms for staff workers. In fact, it can be used to control the grouping of heterogeneous forces of the front-line scale of interethnic forces," the expert noted.
In his opinion, "on the basis of this headquarters ship, a grouping of international forces can be created with the involvement of Ukraine and Georgia, which will be difficult to refuse to help its partners."
In November, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said aboard Mount Whitney [...] that the country was ready to help NATO in ensuring security in the Black Sea region.
In the same month, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that two American strategic bombers performed an unscheduled flight over the Black Sea a hundred kilometers from the country's border.
Ivan Potapov