Russians towing Canadians - Part 2

For a Canadian warship, the ultimate indignity, as I called it in Shipfax, was to be towed to the scrap yard  by a Russian tug. The Canadian navy (as with all NATO navies) played "cat and mouse" with the USSR for years during the cold war, but it was all in earnest, as the expectation of real war was never very far over the horizon.

During that time there was also a large communist bloc presence of fishing vessels from the USSR, Poland, East Germany, and even Bulgaria and Romania off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. They were always near when there was any naval activity and invariably a trawler or a rescue tug or even a research ship showed up in Halifax when there were visiting naval ships from other NATO countries. SeeTugfaxfor photos of USSR rescue tugs here: http://tugfaxblogspotcom.blogspot.ca/2012/10/ussr-rescue-tugs.html and http://tugfaxblogspotcom.blogspot.ca/2012/10/more-ussr-rescue-tugs.html
 
When the USSR was broken up the threat seemed to vanish overnight and Russian (former USSR) ships began to appear under different conditions. As I showed in Part 1, they showed up to tow old ships to the scrappers, and seemingly had their fair share of former naval ships.