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UK and Norway team up to hunt Russian submarines and undersea sabotage
(www.thebarentsobserver.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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Russian u-boats regularly violated Swedish territorial waters. Sweden complained to Russia increasingly persistently as the territorial violations went on. The Russians basically ignored them and continued.
Russian u-boats also went into Finnish territorial waters. The Finns dropped depth charges on them. The Russians complained to the Finns about attacking their boats. The Finns responded by saying, oh, I'm sorry, we were having military exercises. We did not expect anyone to be in that area as that would be illegal. Please make sure you won't go there again because we plan on continuing our exercises. Here is a map. The Russians no longer violate Finnish waters.
What do we all learn from this? Putler is a very simple mafia thug. You don't have civilised conversations with mafia thugs, you punch them in the face. They don't learn any other way.
Text book "how to deal with authoritarian dictators" from Finland there.
Is is not Sweden that put an underwater signal saying "this way if you are gay" to deter Russia ?
Well I want this to be true
Classy move
Something tells me that writing a similar message on a depth charge and dropping it on the Submarine is a more effective deterrent.
Are depth charges still a thing? I thought it would all be homing torpedos by now
A torpedo would've destroyed the boat. They wanted to scare them. I assume they located the u-boat precisely, then set the charges such that no serious damage would be done. The psychological effect on the crew and the show of force was the objective.
It's easy to talk about this in the comfortable West, but to be trapped in a tin can a hundred metres below sea, being shaken thoroughly, alarms blaring, lights flickering, while hearing deafening explosions all around you, is an experience they won't forget quickly.
Sure, but would modern asw ships even have depth charges on board? I'm curious to know whether they are still issued as kind of "shoot across the bow" equivalent for submarines.
They are not that hard to make and you can plan in advance to run 'exercises'. So normally they might not but when they realize a need they can start putting them in rotation.
Funny how simple some weapons are, even relatively modern ones. Depth charges are essentially just like dynamite fishing, but with submarines π
Good question. Perhaps it was this ship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rauma-class_missile_boat firing this weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elma_ASW-600
Or it was this one, which has a rail for depth charges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamina-class_missile_boat
But I'm not an expert at all. Maybe the reports of "depth charges" was just the journalists not having a good understanding of ASW weapons, just like me
It makes sense to still have some "dumb" unguided weapons as a backup, as homing weapons' sensors can be jammed and fooled to go after decoys, while a depth charge that simply drops down to a given point and blows up cannot be easily interfered with in any meaningful way, you can't even locate it using only passive sensors, because it is virtually noiseless apart from the very brief noise it makes when entering the water.
Also, as someone else mentioned, you can easily fire an unguided weapon in such a way that it deliberately misses the target, as a warning.
Very interesting, thanks! Learned something new today!