Russians wanted to play chicken?

[Anomalocaris]

There's no reason they should be that close, unless both captains intended it to happen.

Of course one captain wanted it to happen, and another declined to be seen backing down as it happened.   Turning the other cheek is generally not why these ships would have existed and belonged in organizations called “navies”.   The question is which ship wanted to to happen, and which declined to turn the other cheek.

Which side is which is actually besides the point.   The key point is these types of forceful encounter usually happen for very specific reasons.    Even captains of two antagonistic navies don’t usually just wake up one day and say “let”s just go harass the other guy wherever we meet him in the middle of the ocean, cuz we are like little punks on streets”.   Typically harassment happens because the side doing the harassing doesn’t want the other side to be at a specific location, and is trying to make it dangerous for the other side to stay.  This could be because one side claims a piece of sea and the other guy came to show the claim is not recognized, so the side making the claim harassed the other guy’s ships to make them go away.   The Chinese do this a lot in South China Sea, because the Chinese claim South China Sea, the US doesn’t recognize the claim and send warships through them routinely to show we don’t recognize their claims.   The Chinese then harass the American ships with close passages, cutting off us ships with abrupt turns, some times the Chinese trail cable cutters behind their warships during close encounters to cut off any underwater equipment the American ships trail behind them, like sonars and hydrophone, all to get American nerve on edge while in the claimed territory and make the american ship hurry out of there.

This also happen a lot near Russia when US sendcships buzzing near Russian territorial water or in water with disputed claims, like parts of Black Sea claimed by Russia but which the US asserts to belong to Ukraine.

But this event is odd because the US and Russia had no dispute in the region.    So why would either side do this?

The answer is probably because this is happening near to China, and although not in territory actually claimed by China, it is undoubtedly in territory closely monitored and kept iunder continuous surveillance by the Chinese Navy.   Russia wants to show China that Russia can and will side with China if Chinese relationship with the US worsens.  It is no coincidence this is happening exactly when President Xi of China just began an official state visit to Moscow, and China’s Huawei promised to upgrade Russian’s aging internet infrastructure to 5G before the US can make similar upgrades to American internet backbone.