Tom Sharpe OBE, the former commanding officer of Royal Navy warship HMS St Albans, said: 'The question is, was it deliberate or was it an accident? 'The crew of the submarine would have sh*t themselves,' he said, before adding that the submarine would've also likely incurred damage as a result of the crash. The Royal Navy reported it had shadowed a total of nine Russian warships around the UK in the space of just two weeks in the run up to December 2020.Ī Navy source told the Sun of the collision: ' was badly chewed up and unusable. 'If they were on the surface we would definitely see faces.' The collision was caught on film as part of Channel 5 show Warship: Life At Sea - which airs on Mondays at 9pm.Ĭommander Thom Hobbs says in the clip: 'We are very close to the submarine, we are probably parallel. The collision, which took place in late last year according to a Ministry of Defence (MOD) spokesman, came amid a period of tense close-calls between British and Russian ships.
In the video of the moment of impact, a crew member is heard exclaiming, 'what the f*** have I just hit?'.Īt the time, it is believed the Russian submarine knew that HMS Northumberland was there, but Navy sources said the collision must have been an accident. The collision, which was caught on film by a Channel 5 TV crew, did considerable damage to the HMS Northumberland's sonar device which was raked across the Russian sub's hull, forcing the British crew to abort their mission and return to base for repairs. The Royal Navy's Type 23 frigate sailed into the region where the sub was believed to be hiding and deployed its array sonar - a cable covered in hydrophones pulled along behind the hull - to listen for sounds from the sub.īut in what a navy source has described as a 'million-to-one chance event', the submarine passed right behind the British vessel and smashed into the sonar cable being towed behind the frigate. The Russian submarine was lurking 200 miles north of Scotland in 'late 2020' when the crew of HMS Northumberland was dispatched on a 48-hour mission to hunt it down amid fears it would try to tap into or cut undersea cables essential for communication and the internet.
The Royal Navy has admitted one of its warships collided with a Russian hunter-killer submarine in the north Atlantic in what is believed to be the first collision between Russian and British vessels since the Cold War.
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