ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A U.S. warship passed through Turkey's Bosphorus straits on Friday on its way to the Black Sea, in what the U.S. military has described as a "routine" deployment scheduled well before the crisis in Ukraine.
Washington announced the deployment on Thursday, a day after the Pentagon unveiled plans to put more U.S. fighter jets on a NATO air patrol mission in the Baltics in a bid to reassure allies alarmed by Russia's effective seizure of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula, which juts into the north of the Black Sea.