Russian spy ship enters British waters and shines lasers at military pilots

Oopsie gotta eject and where's that airframe going? Oh my directly at that unsuspecting Russian warship? What shame.

why are these ships not immediately impounded and the crew arrested?

How does a ground level radar even get in the pilots eyes?

Not sowing doubt, just curious what the attack vector is.

So water from the Thames then, yes.

Or the Trump poop meme.

Just run massive planes over the Russian spy ships and dump manure on them.

“Whoopsie doopsie, our evil western planes are so bad that the hatch failed, sowwyy”

How about we let them map all the internet cables, deploy drones over the airports and blow up some infrastructure instead?

As mentioned already, the ship was found in the British economic zone, not inside British borders. This means it was found in international waters, and bombing it is initiation of war.

unfortunate truth

This is a bit like when someone claims China has entered Taiwanese airspace, while neglecting to report that Taiwan claims airspace over mainland China.

Part of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone actually extends over the Chinese mainland, but Chinese flights are challenged by Taiwan only if they cross the median line – the halfway point between the island and the mainland above the Taiwan Strait.

Click-bait journalists love to print headlines that take advantage of their audience's naive understanding of international law and gullibility when it comes to claims of foreign countries doing sinister things. In fairness to the Brits, anyone familiar with Russian media gets fed a similar deluge of "NATO is going to attack us at any moment!" scare pieces.

Great for ratcheting tension, driving up military recruitment, and galvenizing the public to hate anyone suspected of foreign origin or sympathies. Not particularly useful when informing the public of safety concerns.

My very lay-person understanding is that generally there is a level of shit each country accepts, e.g. election meddling, hacking or taking of political prisoners as it is part of the "standard affairs" - and will respond to non-forcefully. (Please don't see me as advocating or trying to downplay these activities, they are abhorrent).

In order to respond with force or war, a lot of prep needs to go in to make sure that the action will be supported by enough allies to both achieve the goal/s and deal with any possible fallout from retaliation.

I believe the EU and its allies sees that a war response to Russian meddling may bring in China more actively into the picture and the US may not come to back them up (unless China decide to re-take Taiwan). OR they see the long-term economic damage to Russia as significant enough to achieve long term regional impact.

Therefore, the EU may not be confident of opening up conflict unless forced to.

IMO Russia's actions in the EU are a clear test of the EU's boundaries and willingness to retaliate.

Well the Russia report described russian money as not just accepted but 'welcomed with open arms' in the UK so really this is just russian ship in the waters of the country they purchased.

what happened in china??

They've been going tit-for-tat with flyovers and sail-bys for a while.

For the same reason Russians aren't in a hurry to shoot down an RAF aircraft, Brits don't really want to start a shooting war over some Russians with laser pointers.

It's still in international waters, unfortunately.

Reddit moment.

You know I've never tried to track a jet with a handheld laser pointer but I imagine it's not easy so I'm going to guess it's some sort of fixed device like perhaps a range finder for a deck gun or ciws.

Apparently it effectively blinded fighter pilots in a separate incident, so no, not a consumer device.