Quote:
Originally Posted by cawest
Greece might not be in NATO anymore but the USSR is still going to sink your ships.
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The Soviets figured that the cargo moving on the world's oceans wasn't going to make it through the NATO blockades along the approaches to the USSR, so if it's moving it isn't for them and therefore possibly for NATO or neutral countries. Either way they aren't going to risk the possibility of being sighted and called in, so it's more or less a sink on sight (visual, radar or shipborne helicopter) policy.
And the Greeks were the largest owners of ships in the world at the time, so it was inevitable both that some of them would see the earning potential of carrying cargo to combatant nations and that some of their ships would get sunk. Most of their ships weren't even Greek flagged (which obligated them to use more expensive Greek crews and follow all kinds of pesky bureaucratic rules!).
So it's not really that the Soviets targeted the ship knowing it was Greek, it was more a case of "nothing personal, its just business"!