A fleet of Russian warships sailing off the coast of Norway were spotted by the Norwegian military Monday and are reportedly heading toward Syria, according to newly released photographs.
The eight vessels photographed by Norwegian surveillance aircraft included its flagship aircraft carrier the Admiral Kuznetsov and the Pyotr Velikiy battle cruiser, Reuters reported Tuesday.
“We have been informed that they are en route to the Mediterranean,” Major Elisabeth Eikeland, spokeswoman of the National Joint Headquarters in the Norwegian army, told AFP. “It’s not every day that so many ships sail together off Norway.”
General Morten Haga Lunde, head of the Norwegian military intelligence service, told a local news outlet that the eight ships pictured “will probably play a role in the deciding battle for Aleppo.”
An anonymous senior NATO diplomat, citing Western intelligence, was more certain that the Russian ships were carrying fighter bombers to likely bolster Moscow’s joint assault with Syrian forces on the rebel-held city of Aleppo.
“They are deploying all of the Northern fleet and much of the Baltic fleet in the largest surface deployment since the end of the Cold War,” the diplomat toldReuters. “This is not a friendly port call. In two weeks, we will see a crescendo of air attacks on Aleppo as part of Russia’s strategy to declare victory there.”
Russia announced on Saturday that its Soviet-era Admiral Kuznetsov would join Moscow’s military forces in the eastern Mediterranean, where its troops are launching a bombing campaign against Syrian rebels.
The siting by Norwegian forces came a day after Syria’s government-affiliated telecommunications company announced that 60 percent of the country’s Internet will be down for ten days beginning Wednesday. The anticipated outage would come just days after U.S. intelligence and military officials reported a Russian ship equipped with cable-cutting technology near the coast of Syria.
Moscow, which has allied itself with the Bashar al Assad regime in Syria’s civil war, briefly paused its air bombing in Aleppo on Tuesday as an act of “goodwill” to allow civilians to evacuate from the rebel-held city.
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