This type of activity, and worse, has been going on in international waters for 60 years.
It's routine. They do it, we do it. And a lot worse too.
Why the big protest now?
Getting this close isn’t “business as usual” They wouldn’t let us get so close we could actually take out one of their ships w/o trying to destroy our planes - e should have shot some of them out of the air instead of letting them in on the fact that they aren’t allowed to even protect themselves as our own business as usual. They discovered that they can get in and destroy our ships because policy dictates that’s better than pissing off anyone else in the world.
Slightly different subject, but somewhat related: I grew up in rural Nebraska near a P47 training base. Practically every day they would come up and do dog fights with each other or if bombers on training missions came by, with those. In addition, they would do strafing runs along the section roads. I was too young to go to school, but my older brother walked the 2.5 miles. A few years ago he described those strafing runs & I asked, “How high were the planes?” He said, “About twice the elevation of the telephone posts”.
My career took me away from the farm, but one summer during the cold war, I heard a low flying jet. It was a B52 flying about a wing span high about half a mile west. Talked to the local farmers & found out it was the practice range for low level bombing missions to the Soviet Union. I don’t know if they ever flew at night, but at times the windows were blacked out. Later Stealth bombers used the run. I never did see one. The B52s you could hear and spot, but the farmers said that the stealth bombers were gone by the time you heard them. It was only by accident that you saw them.
I got a reply from my BIL who flew P2V Neptunes.
For what it is worth, he said they were never buzzed by Russian aircraft either aboard ship or on the plane. The one close incident they did have was when they flew close (500’) to a Russian warship.
He said the ship turned on their anti aircraft defense and could have easily shot them down but never fired. He did say they were sweating it out.
Another time their plane caught on fire while they were shadowing a Russian freighter near Maine. They were going to ditch near the ship hoping they would be picked up.
Fortunately, the fire was in a radar in the planes bottom and they were able to extinguish it.