Russian spy ship fire exposes poor state of Mediterranean fleet, say experts

Last week, the HTS cancelled a 2019 contract with a Russian company, ending its control of the Tartus commercial port, which Moscow had hoped would be a $500m hub for exporting Russian agricultural products to the wider Middle East. That was a bad omen for the naval base, said Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow on sea power at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) in London. “The cancellation of the commercial arrangement is the writing on the wall for the navy, given how hand-in-hand the commercial and the strategic positions were,” Kaushal said. The loss of Tartus would turn chronic problems in the Russian fleet into a crisis, he argued.