Chinese And Russian Warships Complete Circumnavigation Of Japan
A joint Chinese and Russian naval group has completed a circumnavigation of the Japanese archipelago and its outlying islands, in a deployment that Japan's self-defence forces tracked continuously from the East China Sea to the Sea of Okhotsk. The group comprised three Chinese vessels and one Russian corvette, and its route took it past features whose legal status both Beijing and Tokyo contest.
The Chinese element consisted of a large surface combatant of the navy's heaviest class, a guided-missile destroyer and a replenishment oiler, accompanied by a Russian corvette. Japan's joint staff shadowed the formation with two destroyers and maritime patrol aircraft over the course of the deployment. The route ran through the Miyako Strait, past Okinotorishima, past the Senkaku Islands and up into the Sea of Okhotsk, and did not include a transit of the Taiwan Strait.
Dates attached to individual sightings vary by a day between accounts, both of which cite the same Japanese source. One places the group 220 kilometres off Cape Inubo on 23 July and 300 kilometres off Cape Nosappu on 25 July, while the other gives 25 and 26 July respectively. The class of the largest Chinese unit is also described inconsistently, as a cruiser in one account and a destroyer in another, which reflects a genuine ambiguity in how the type is categorised rather than a factual dispute.
Japan's defence minister said the deployment would be monitored closely. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman used the occasion to restate Beijing's position that Okinotorishima is a rock rather than an island, a distinction that determines whether Japan can claim an exclusive economic zone of some 400,000 square kilometres around it. Sailing a naval group past the feature is a way of asserting that position without saying anything further, and it is the element of the deployment most clearly aimed at a legal argument rather than a military one.
Neither Beijing nor Moscow issued a statement describing the deployment, which means the operational details available come from the country being circled. Some reporting refers to a sixteen-day patrol originating at Qingdao and to the possible involvement of submarines, but those elements rest on a single account that itself describes the submarine question as unclear. What is well established is the pattern: joint circumnavigations of Japan by these two navies have become an annual fixture, they are conducted in international waters, and their function is to demonstrate that the two states can operate together across the full length of Japan's approaches whenever they choose to.
