U.S. European Command, with the complicity of the British Royal Air Force, the Ukranian government and possibly NATO, staged yet another provocation against Russia yesterday, perhaps the most serious one of recent weeks. A pair of B-52 bombers took off from Fairford, England —Eucom said three but where the third one went is not known— flew across Ukraine down towards Crimea and then flew in a racetrack pattern along the border between Crimea and the Russian border for some period of time. At the same time, at least three electronic intelligence aircraft, two British and one American, were flying over the Black Sea collecting data on Russian radars and other transmitters in order to build an “electronic map” so to speak, of Russian air defenses in Crimea and southern Russia. There may have been other aircraft participating in this operation as well but they didn’t have their digital transponders (called Mode S), turned on. There is likely only one reason for such operations and that is war preparation. This operation, and earlier such operations intended to provoke a Russian air defense response, look suspiciously designed for the gathering of data for input into a military campaign plan for the taking of Crimea from Russia.
The War Zone’s Joseph Trevithick wrote in an article posted in the aftermath of the U.S./British operation that the deployment of the intelligence aircraft “makes good sense” because the bombers were certain to rouse the interest of Russian air defenses by their location—obviously intended because if they had carried out their “integration training” with the Ukrainian air force over Western Ukraine there wouldn’t have been any Russian military response. “The ability of the RC-135V/Ws and the Airseeker (British version of the U.S. RC-135), especially, to detect, classify, and geolocate various types of emitters, including air defense radars, means that they would have had a particularly good opportunity to help add to the known ‘electronic order of battle’ of Russian forces in the broader Black Sea region,” Trevithick writes. He warns at the end, however: “Sending B-52s to southeastern Ukraine is sure to draw new responses from the Kremlin, which may feel a need to further escalate with its own shows of force in response.”
Russia’s National Defense Control Center reported a heavy Russian response. “Four Su-27 fighter jets and four Su-30 fighter jets of the Southern Military District’s air defense units on duty were scrambled to intercept the U.S. Air Force aircraft over the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, with the aim to prevent their unauthorized incursion into the Russian airspace,” the center said, reported TASS.
