The Royal Navy of Britain said Wednesday that it had monitored a Russian merchant ship and a warship this week as they traveled through the English Channel to the North Sea.

The Royal Navy stated that HMS Somerset "watched each move" while Russia's Boikiy Warship escorted Baltic Leader through UK water.

The British navy regularly conducts shadowing operations to monitor potential threats to the national security. This includes critical infrastructure, such as cables and pipelines undersea.

HMS Somerset tracked suspected Russian spy ship Yantar in January while Royal Navy ships tracked six Russian merchant and naval ships that were carrying ammunition to Syria via the Channel last month.

Somerset began monitoring Boikiy Saturday as the Russian warship traveled south through the North Sea, English Channel and to meet Baltic Leader to escort this vessel (which came from Syria) back to Russia.

The British Times published images on Tuesday of sailors operating machine guns aboard the Boikiy, which escorted a vessel sanctioned for transporting arms on behalf the Russian military by the U.S. (Reporting and editing by Sarah Young; Sachin Ravikumar)

(source: Reuters)