dw correspondent nick connolly has spent the last three days on board a u.s.avy destroyer taking part in sea breeze. he joins us from odessa on the black sea in ukraine. what have you witnessed aboard the uss ross? reporter: those were three days in which basically the russians were never more than a few miles away, either with ships or planes. at times it felt there were as many russians in the water in the part of the plexi where we were in as -- part of the lack see where we were in as others. our american host were vy keen to talk about t operational side of things, how they practiced whatever skill with their ukrainian counterparts, but they were nervous about talking about the russians, the same russians only a few miles from the boat i was on. seemingly very careful not to be accused of warmongering, trying to tone things down and seem to be focusing on the task at hand. it was a bizarre situation to find out why these exercises are needed, who are aimed at and the potential opponent. we were told time and again these are just exercises in international

and for more i'm now joined by dw correspondent nick a connolly. he joined us from odessa, a port city on the black sea in ukraine and nick us. so good to you. you have just spent the last 3 days on the navy destroyer. the u. s. s. ross, i tell us about your experience. is there wallclear, we were shattered the whole time by russian aircraft russian ships were within a few miles nautical miles of us destroy. i was on the bizarre thing was that the commanders and the officers on board that american destroyer basically weren't allowed, was seemingly, were told, not even mentioned russia by name. so we had lots of talk about interoperability between the u. s. navy, with the ukranian navies and other countries, but spacing in this side. but there was no talk about basically the elephant in the room. the ships we were seeing, the plains that were buzzing the ship. i was on. that was pretty strange, given that we've come out of months of tensions between the western russia over ukraine, we saw russia messing troops on ukraine borders. so a bit of a strang