Russia announced today that it is sending two frigates across the Bosphorus to the Mediterranean at a time when tensions are rising in Syria between Moscow and Ankara, whose 33 soldiers were killed.
The frigates Admiral Grigorovich and Admiral Makarov left Sevastopol, on the Crimean peninsula, and began crossing the Bosphorus, a spokesman for the Russian Black Sea Fleet told Russian news agencies Interfax and Riya Novosti.
Those two ships equipped with Kalibr cruise missiles are planned to join the Russian Navy's standing fleet in the Mediterranean, spokesman Alexei Rulev said.
He did not say in which zone the frigates would be deployed, but the ships heading that way usually support Russian military operations in Syria.
That mission followed a few hours after the death of 33 Turkish soldiers in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, in airstrikes by Syrian government forces.
Russia, which is an ally of the Syrian authorities, accused Turkish soldiers earlier today of being "among the combat units of terrorist groups", stating that "they should not have been there".
The incident further weakened Russian-Turkish agreements reached in recent years aimed at establishing peace in Syria.
As a country bordering the Black Sea, Russia is bound by the 1936 Montreal Convention on the free movement of warships through the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. According to that convention, Ankara is obliged to allow the passage of Russian warships, unless Turkey is a party to the conflict, or is considered to be in imminent danger of war.
The regular passage of Russian warships going to and from Syria, called the "Syrian Express", always causes a lot of attention in Istanbul, as the ships have to pass through a passage in the very heart of the city.
Bonus video:
