Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in a TV interview yesterday that not only is the U.S. military sending more reconnaissance aircraft near Russia’s borders, it is also practicing for potential strikes on Russian territory. He noted a sharp uptick in foreign surveillance and training flights testing the country’s borders and air defenses, reported RT. Last month, such activities increased by some 30% compared to August 2019.
Moreover, the NATO bloc’s aircraft have been actively training to conduct air strikes, routinely performing mock missile launches on targets within the country, Shoigu revealed. The most alarming thing is that if earlier — even though not that frequently — there were mainly reconnaissance aircraft, they’ve now begun regular training flights with large numbers of planes, during which mock missile strikes are conducted.
More broadly there seems considerable discussion within Russian military circles about what last week’s operation, involving B-52s flying over Ukraine in concert with intelligence-gathering aircraft flying over the Black Sea, actually indicated. BulgarianMilitary.com ran the translation from the Russian online newspaper Vzglyad with the headline “Ukraine Will Become a Springboard for a U.S. Nuclear Strike on Russia.” It reports, “Experts are confident that the bombers in the Ukrainian sky not only studied the potential theater of military operations, but also practiced the tactics of an air attack.”
