Russia | Photo: Tapio Lehtinen met a Russian warship at sea

Russian On Tuesday, the landing craft belonging to the Baltic Sea fleet showed off to the boats that sailed in the Roschier Baltic Sea Race in the RORC series of open sea sailing near the coast of Estonia.

An experienced round-the-world sailor Tapio Lehtinen according to the Russian ship was about 20 nautical miles or about 35 kilometers from the coast of Saaremaa.

“A big Russian landing craft that was moving quite calmly bow towards Saaremaa”, describes Lehtinen.

“A ship in the shape of a classic warship, a frigate, with a bit like the stern cut off, and at the stern there are hellishly big hatches, from which some smaller landing craft are apparently spit out.”

The footage from Lehtinen’s boat reveals that the Russian warship is a large Ropucha-class landing craft named after a World War II war hero Aleksandr Shabalin by.

“We were maybe a mile apart. That’s all we could see, that the number on the bow was 110, but we couldn’t find out the name of the ship,” says Lehtinen.

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“A big Russian landing craft that moved quite calmly bowing towards Saaremaa.”

Of the Ropucha class the ships were built in Poland mainly in the 1970s and 1980s by order of the Soviet Navy. The ships can even carry tanks as cargo.

Lehtinen’s fleet, which sailed to the finish at Katajanokka on Wednesday, did not spot any other Russian ships on the route from Helsinki to Stockholm, around Gotland, the coast of Estonia and back to Helsinki.

“Now that the weather has been nice and visibility is good, you can see so far. There was no major activity going on there,” says Lehtinen.

A couple of years ago, Lehtinen saw a Russian submarine in the same waters that had surfaced.

“I called them on the VHF radio, but I didn’t get an answer. Both things are routine things in themselves. After all, they roam here, and they are not particularly sociable.”

The boat crews participating in the RORC series were warned before the competition about possible encounters with Russian warships.

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“There was no major activity going on there.”

Leaflet according to findings, the landing craft Aleksandr Šabalin did not violate Estonia’s territorial integrity while sailing towards Saaremaa.

“Yes, they were quite close to international waters, but quite close to Estonia’s territorial waters,” he says.

The skipper of Tuliketu, which sailed to the finish line on Tuesday morning Arto Linnervuo said Roschier in the Baltic Sea Race announcement that he saw Russian warships during the race.

Linnervuo’s observations were also further away, and he had not heard of near-miss situations with Russian ships.

“They were well ahead of us, but it’s very possible that they saw the same ship, because we haven’t seen any other ship,” Lehtinen commented on Tuliketu’s findings.

Tapio Lehtinen has sailed Galiana WithSecure around the world. Picture: Roni Rekomaa / Magazine photo