Colloquially, there’s no distinction. The OP seemed to be using it as a term of art.
The manual largely describes US practice rather than the actual state of international law (particularly the part about consent to inspection.) But the point is that the ship is a vehicle rather than part of a sovereign state, even though it is treated as part of the state in some ways.
Any landing you can walk away from is a good one. Any landing where you get to use the plane again is a GREAT landing.
I agree with you that warships aren’t part of the land territory of a state, and their presence can’t be used to justify additional powers for the state over a region (like an EEZ) in the way that actual land territory could be used. But the Convention on the High Seas at Article 8, and the Convention on the Law of the Sea at Articles 30-32, are both explicit that warships are part of the sovereign and share in its sovereign immunity.
Nothing prevents the coastal state from expelling the warship from its territorial sea, of course. Or going after the warship’s flag state for damages caused by the warship. Any inspections of a warship or jurisdiction over it or its crew, are going to be governed by a visiting forces or status of forces agreement where the flag state agreed to surrender some of its immunity. We’re probably agreeing, and the whole topic is a big leap from the question of whether a Bear can land on a Nimitz anyway.
Thank you very much LSLGuy for your extremely informative answer and walking us through the reasoning. That a Bear’s landing gear could probably handle a carrier landing—once—is perhaps the most surprising estimate for me. I thought it would have collapsed.
What about if you deliberately landed it with landing gear up and scraped along the deck? would that shorten the landing distance? Or would it just result in an uncontrollable path where you plummet off the deck to left or right?
Remember we are just talking about the defectors landing, not about the plane being in any way usable afterwards.
So what we need is two carriers line astern; simples! 
In that case, you might as well just jump from the plane and let it go on its way. Defectors usually bring their aircraft with them because they know they’ll be more valuable that way. The receiving country tests the plane and strips it down to garner whatever useful information it can and then sends it back. See Victor Belenko, for example (though he went to Japan.)
How much modification to the Tu-95 is going to be allowed for this admittedly pointless exercise and how flight worthy is it going to have to remain afterwards? After the Operation Eagle Claw/Desert One debacle, a crash program for a second rescue attempt of the hostages in Iran was created with the basis of converting a C-130 into a super-STOL, Operation Credible Sport. The resultant highly modified XFC-130H was to take off in the US, perform five in-flight refuelings, land on and take off from the Amjadieh Football Stadium, and then land on an aircraft carrier. Taking off from, much less landing on the Amjadieh Stadium was a far shorter landing strip than had ever been considered and:
There’s a video on youtube here with horribly cheesy music.
I don’t know if a Tu-95 could structurally survive 8 or more forward firing ASROC motors, if that would be a requirement for a successful landing, or how the captain of the Nimitz would feel about the scorch marks on the deck, but it does show that large planes can be modified to land on and take off from much smaller areas than they were designed for.
Tres cool. I hadn’t seen that before.
Modifications with an unlimited budget know almost no bounds. With enough helicopter blades and retro-rockets we could make the TU-95 hover. Or with enough extra thrust, make the Nimitz go 140 knots. But now we’re getting silly, as opposed to just dumb.
Fun to think about though.
On the diplomatic front I’m gonna suggest a military ship at sea is legally about as sovereign as an embassy. At least to the level of detail we care about here. Certainly over the years many survivors and defectors from ships and subs have been taken aboard by military vessels from the other side. This is pretty settled law and practice.
The wing catches fire and falls off around 2:10 in the video. I’m assuming that’s at least part of what killed the program?
Any plane can be used again for scrap metal.
Partly; that and Carter losing the election on November 4th. The crash happened on October 29th:
This is kinda cool. I had no idea that they were practically designing new aircraft for the hostage rescue.
Wow, talk about a comprehensive answer! 
Its close enough for government work!
I don’t think sliding would reduce the stopping length much, it might even make matters worse? It would certainly be a rougher impact.
Here’s how I look at the question. An experienced Naval Aviator (a Naval Aviator is a Pilot who is carrier qualified) with hundreds of carrier landings in aircraft specifically designed to be able to land on a carrier needs the assistance of a Landing Safety Officer and the bridge crew to land safely on the carrier. I don’t think a pilot with NO experience landing on a carrier flying an aircraft that was never intended to land on a carrier that was never designed to have an aircraft that large and heavy landed on it with no assistance from the bridge and no LSO to guide it down has a whelk’s chance in a super nova of making a landing.
The arresting barricade stanchions of the Mk 7 Mod 3 arresting system are 130ft apart. Would losing 15ft off each wing be ok?
Actually, it’s referred to as US territory. 4.5 acres of US territory IIRC.
ETA
Each carrier is sovereign U.S. territory
Having worked on a Nimitz, you bring up a good point with the barricade, but are probably underestimating the damage. From what I was told, use of the barricade pretty much garaunteed the aircraft was going to be hauled off to depot level maintenance once we were back in port and quite possibly the airframe would be considered unsalvageable. And that’s for planes that were supposed to land on one.
Much like air dropping, you can probably land anything on a carrier the once. The pilot would sharply regret doing so, however.
As I said above, a Tu-95 intact would not be worth the risk. Certainly not today but even at the height of the cold war its value would be in capturing the avionics and assorted electronic technology (and its flight crew), not the air frame itself. It would have certainly been a political & propaganda coup, but there was nothing super-secret about the aerodynamics or power plants of the Bear. It was just a turboprop B-52…
well the Tu-95 was the Soviet Unions primary intercontinental nuclear bomber. So presumably it has some pretty sophisticated encryption comms for communicating authorisation to enable the nuclear weapons on board. And hopefully the Soviet Union also had a permissive action link system to stop a rogue crew from dropping nuclear weapons without authorisation. The US would have been very keen to know the details of that.
So yeah, during the cold war I’m pretty sure that the US would have been pretty keen to get their hands on one with a cooperative crew and all the crypto intact. Ok sure not keen enough to let them land on an aircraft carrier but I bet they would have gone out of there way in many other ways to get one.
Do you care if the crew and maybe a bunch of folks on the air craft carrier die? If not then you could probable steam the carrier into the wind, have the bomber crew fly at the lowest speed they could without stalling, then pull up above the carrier deck and stall the bomber. With a lot of luck and some really exceptional timing you might be able to have the thing crash on the deck, probably killing the crew and damaging the air craft carrier but have the bomber ‘land’ in a kind of sort of way (i.e. not fall off the deck into the ocean, and hopefully not blow up). A quick google search shows the landing speed of a TU-95 as 150 knots (~170 mph)…so, if the head wind is, say 50 mph, and the carrier is steaming at 40 knots, then the bomber pilot just has to skim along the water, pull up at the right moment to kill his air speed, stall and then drop to the deck, nose up and in full pucker mode!
Simple really. 