Yesterday, the Admiral Gorshkov – one of Russia’s newest and most advanced warships – was docked in the popular US cruise port of Havana, Cuba, as a US Destroyer hauntingly shadowed from 50 miles away in the Strait of Florida. Weighing 4,500 tonnes, the Russian Navy vessel is the largest warship to be built since the fall of the Soviet Union and was designed to carry supersonic cruise missiles capable of striking the US coast within six minutes from that range. Moscow warned on Monday that the US build-up of weapons in Europe risked a repeat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was arguably the closest the world ever came to all-out nuclear war.
The two-week standoff in 1962 erupted when the Soviet Union responded to a US missile deployment in Turkey and Italy a year earlier by sending their own ballistic missiles to Cuba – just miles from the US coastline of Florida.
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to Cuba's request to place nuclear missiles on the island to deter a future invasion and an agreement was reached during a secret meeting with former Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro to start preparations.
However, US President John F. Kennedy was left furious when his Air Force U-3 spy plane produced clear photographic evidence of Cuba preparing for the arrival of medium-range (SS-4) and intimidate-range (R-14) ballistic missiles.
The US announced it would not permit offensive weapons to be delivered to Cuba and immediately created a blockade in the surrounding waters until the weapons were dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union.
Putin sent his most intimidating warship to Cuba (Image: GETTY)
The ship arrived at the tourist vessel in Havna (Image: GETTY)
We may find ourselves in the situation of a missile crisis pretty close to the Caribbean one.
Sergei Ryabkov
After several days of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev, with a secret clause that the US would dismantle all its nuclear-tipped missiles in Turkey.
In modern times, the Kremlin has moved to step up Soviet-era military
