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A Russian warship carried out a live-fire artillery exercise roughly 40 nautical miles off the British coast on Monday.

Getting into it: The frigate, the Neustrashimy, warned a Royal Navy patrol vessel shadowing it that it was about to open fire and told the British ship to pull back to a safer range. The 30-minute exercise took place in international waters south of Plymouth and was monitored throughout by the Royal Navy and by a French military aircraft, which got on the radio to ask the warship what it was doing. Exactly what it fired still hasn’t been made public.

Running a live-fire drill on short notice this close to another country is unusual, the kind of thing that’s normally flagged well in advance. It’s still legal, as long as the crew puts out the right safety warnings first.

The 420-foot Neustrashimy, part of Russia’s Baltic Fleet, carries anti-ship cruise missiles and a 100mm gun that can pump out 50 rounds a minute. It turned up earlier this month to relieve another frigate, the Admiral Grigorovich, which had been out on a long deployment.

The exercise was the latest in a run of Russian naval activity in UK waters. The Neustrashimy has been escorting Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet,” the network of tankers Moscow uses to move oil around Western sanctions tied to its war in Ukraine, and it’s the second Russian warship in the past few weeks to shepherd one of those tankers through the Channel.

Tensions have been running high after Royal Marine Commandos boarded and seized a Russian-linked shadow fleet tanker in the Channel last month, something UK forces had never done before.

The timing was also notable as it fell on the same day Andy Burnham became prime minister. UK defense officials wouldn’t tell the BBC whether the drill was deliberately lined up to land on Burnham’s first day in the job.