Gen. Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian General Staff, warned yesterday following the conclusion of the Kavkaz 2020 exercise that U.S. and NATO forces are exercising ever closer to the borders of Russia, often as close as 20-30 km from the border. “The United States and NATO are expanding their military activities not in the Atlantic or Caribbean regions, but at a distance of some 20-30 km off the Russian borders. So, NATO’s allegations about Russia’s growing aggressiveness are false,” he said.
Separately, in an interview with RT, Gerasimov charged that Russia’s calls to NATO to discuss aircraft encounters near Russia’s borders have fallen on deaf ears. As a result, Russia is retraining its pilots to make sure these frequent mid-air incidents don’t get out of hand. Russian armed forces have registered “almost 30 NATO strategic aircraft quite close to our borders” over the last month, Gerasimov said. “We are wary of these frequent U.S./NATO air missions close to our borders.”
Moscow has been tirelessly trying to raise the issue of close-call encounters in the air and at sea with top U.S. and NATO military brass, asking them “to improve the current agreements on the prevention of dangerous military activities.” “The thing is that we already have such agreements, we’ve signed them,” Gerasimov clarified. However, some details — namely approach intervals, safe approach distances for aircraft and ships, and operational procedures — were neglected, and the overall endeavor to decrease tension was overlooked. No one has given us a response. So we can see that NATO and American military commanders are OK with this situation.”
