Yacht couple reject Russian frigate account of shots

The retired British couple whose yacht had warning shots fired near it by a Russian warship in the English Channel have disputed Moscow’s account of the incident, describing the experience as “surreal” and rejecting the Russian claim that they made a dangerous approach, in an interview with BBC Newsnight.

Jane and Alan Kelvey were sailing around 23 miles off the Isle of Wight on Tuesday morning, on passage from Lymington to Cherbourg, when they came into close contact with the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich. Speaking to Victoria Derbyshire in a broadcast interview for Newsnight, the couple gave a detailed account that runs directly counter to the version since put out by the Russian Ministry of Defence.

By Jane Kelvey’s account, the couple spotted a vessel in the distance that was not showing on their AIS, the automatic identification system, and as they closed they saw it was a warship, around four to five hundred metres off their starboard side, motionless and, she said, holding station rather than adrift. The ship gave five blasts on its horn, she said, prompting the couple to turn two degrees to port to show they had made a deliberate change of course and seen it, before a second set of five blasts was followed by four or five rounds of small arms fire that she believed went up into the air and was not aimed at them.

The couple were adamant that they posed no danger to the frigate and that the Russian vessel made no attempt to contact them before opening fire. “They didn’t send up any flares, they didn’t try to radio us,” Jane Kelvey said, adding that the ship did not look adrift and that the yacht was “definitely not on a collision course”. Her husband added simply, “we were gonna miss them.” As far as they were concerned, she said, “it wasn’t an incident until the gunfire started.”

Pressed on the Russian Ministry of Defence statement, which said the frigate had detected the British-flagged yacht “proceeding under engine power on a dangerous course close to the ship”, Jane Kelvey rejected it flatly, saying “absolutely not” and that the couple were “not on a dangerous course”. Asked what they made of the Russian version, Alan Kelvey called it “normal lies”, while his wife said “it’s just not true, they’re blaming us and as far as we’re concerned, we were blameless.” Both described the firing as completely unnecessary.

Despite the encounter, the couple recounted it with striking calm, with Alan Kelvey describing it as “just another day”. Jane Kelvey said her immediate instinct had been to get on the VHF radio and call the Solent coastguard to report what the Russian warship was doing, but that she had held off because the frigate would have been able to hear the transmission, waiting instead until she could get a signal to dial 999 for the coastguard. She reported the incident, she said, only because sailors are expected to report anything that causes a hazard to navigation.

The couple described a lengthy back-and-forth with the authorities that followed, involving the Solent coastguard and its French counterpart at Jobourg, before the Royal Navy offshore patrol vessel HMS Tyne came by in the afternoon to check they were safe. Jane Kelvey said she had been surprised at how much the episode had “blown up” and disappointed at the accusations made against them, which she maintained were untrue, while Alan Kelvey said the Russians “shouldn’t really be firing when people are around”.

Their account adds a sharply different perspective to the picture set out by the British Ministry of Defence, which has said the Grigorovich fired warning shots to prevent a possible collision and was understood to have been drifting rather than under power at the time, while assessing the episode as an isolated incident unconnected to the Royal Navy’s boarding last week of the sanctioned Russian shadow fleet tanker SMYRTOS. The couple’s version, in which the warship was holding station, made no radio contact and fired despite the yacht altering course to pass clear, leaves open questions about how the two sides came to such different readings of the same encounter in one of the world’s busiest waterways.

The Kelveys, for their part, told Newsnight they intended to press on, with Alan Kelvey saying they planned to keep sailing for the next two months. Asked how they had marked the end of the day, Jane Kelvey said they had needed a drink when they got in, a rosé for her and a beer for her husband, after more than twelve hours at sea and an hour and a half with the French gendarmerie.