Surfaced Black Hole submarine in South China Sea startles Philippines

Russia was surprised by the reaction from the authorities of the Philippines to the presence of the Russian Ufa, or the Black Hole submarine, in the waters of the South China Sea, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

Photo: function.mil.ru by the Russian Defense Ministry, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Knyaz Vladimir submarine

Spokespeople for the Philippine Navy said that the submarine was detected on November 28. The BRP Jose Rizal (FF150) ship established radio contact with the submarine. The sub crew said that they were "waiting for better weather conditions" to leave for Vladivostok.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., in turn, set out a concern about the incident, noting that any entrance into the country's exclusive economic zone was a matter of "great concern" for the island nation.

Commenting on the reaction from the Philippine authorities, Zakharova recalled Article 58 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and emphasized that the presence of a foreign submarine in the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines was absolutely legal.

"The fact that the submarine was surfaced and the crew was ready to contact representatives of the armed forces of the coastal state indicates the absence of any hidden motives for its presence in the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines," Zakharova said.

In late October, spokespeople for the Pacific Fleet of the Russian Navy said that the Kalibr missile carrier was making an inter-fleet passage from the Baltic to the Pacific Fleet via the Southern Sea Route. According to the press service, the submarine, accompanied by the Alatau rescue tug made a business call at the port of Cochin, Republic of India in the Arabian Sea.

In November, the Ufa called at the port of Surabaya, Indonesia. The same month, the submarine conducted the Passex naval exercises with Malaysian Navy ships in the South China Sea.

The Kilo-class submarines are a group of diesel-electric attack submarines designed by the Rubin Design Bureau in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and built originally for the Soviet Navy.

The first version had the Soviet designation Project 877 Paltus, NATO reporting name Kilo. They entered operational service in 1980 and continued being built until the mid-1990s, when production switched to the more advanced Project 636 Varshavyanka variant, also known in the West as the Improved Kilo class. The design was updated again by the Russian Navy in the mid-2010s, to a variant called Project 636.3, also known as Improved Kilo II.

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The South China Sea is a marginal sea of the Western Pacific Ocean. It is bounded in the north by South China, in the west by the Indochinese Peninsula, in the east by the islands of Taiwan and northwestern Philippines (mainly Luzon, Mindoro and Palawan), and in the south by Borneo, eastern Sumatra and the Bangka Belitung Islands, encompassing an area of around 3,500,000 km² (1,400,000 sq mi). It communicates with the East China Sea via the Taiwan Strait, the Philippine Sea via the Luzon Strait, the Sulu Sea via the straits around Palawan, and the Java Sea via the Karimata and Bangka Straits. The Gulf of Thailand and the Gulf of Tonkin are part of the South China Sea.