Russian military war games caught fishermen by surprise

About a month after Russian naval exercises caused panic among American fishermen in the Bering Sea, local residents are still wary of what the incident means for commercial fishing, subsistence harvesting and other marine activities in the region.

Chad See is the executive director of the Freezer Longline Coalition, which oversees 20 cod fishing vessels in the Bering Sea. Their vessels operate along the Western edge of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, EEZ for short, and into the North Bering Sea, where last month’s incident occurred. See said some of the coalition’s vessels were in the area when the Russian navy sailed into the American EEZ and began to practice firing missiles.

“A Russian military plane buzzed two of our vessels, came down within 200 feet in an effort to drive us away from our fishing grounds,” he said. “The captain and fishermen, they were scared that this situation was escalating and that some harm may come to them if they didn’t comply with the Russian military.”

See said the vessels received no indication that the exercise was a drill, and one of them cut its fishing lines loose in order to escape. They sacrificed significant amounts of time and money abandoning their fishing grounds, he said.

After the incident, it was revealed that the U.S. Coast Guard had been informed that a Russian naval operation would happen in the area and had posted a public notice about it. But See said the notice was not at all descriptive and was posted through a service that no commercial fishing captains would have any normal reason to check.

“By no means was there any sufficient notification provided so that these vessels’ captains would understand that there were Russian military operations occurring in our waters,” he said. In subsequent conversations with the Coast Guard, See was told that foreign navy ships are legally allowed to conduct exercises in the U.S. EEZ, an area within 200 nautical miles from the U.S. coast where American ships have the exclusive right to fish.

However, foreign entities are not allowed to disrupt economic activities in that zone. When the Russian planes buzzed the two fishing vessels and told them to leave the area, the ships could have theoretically stayed where they were without consequence.

“But of course, if you’re on the water and you have a plane buzzing you, or a destroyer sitting in front of you, and there’s notification from a Russian speaking broken English on your radio saying that there’s missiles in the area, you’re not going to stay there,” See said.

The incident occurred amid an increase in military activities across the Arctic. Just a few days earlier, the USS Seawolf, a U.S. Navy submarine, surfaced in the Barents Sea near Tromsø, Norway, close to where the Russian submarine fleet is based.

U.S. fighter jets have also been deployed at least a dozen times to intercept incoming Russian military aircraft this year, which the North American Aerospace Defense Command says is the highest number of intercepts in recent years.

A 2019 report from the Department of Defense cites the Arctic as an increasingly important strategic area, as climate change and melting sea ice open up shipping lanes and undersea resources.

The environmental impact of increased activities in the Arctic, both military and commercial, is not totally understood, but research has shown that many marine species, especially marine mammals, are negatively impacted by shipping noise.

Researchers in Russia are working with Native hunters in Novoye Chaplino to measure how increased shipping noise along the North Sea Route is affecting whale populations there, but no definitive results have been reported.

In light of the inevitable growing strategic importance of the Arctic, See said he was most interested in clear communication between the Russian and U.S. militaries and the local residents who rely on Arctic waters for income and food.

“Our interest is in ensuring that this does not happen again, and that there are clear rules of the road understood by the Russians or any other foreign agency that they cannot interfere with U.S. fishing operations if they are in our EEZ,” he said.