British, U.S. and Swedish electronic gathering flights close to Russia’s border inside the Arctic Circle have become regular in the years after Moscow launched its war on Ukraine.
The flight this week, however, was a first-of-a-kind.
With take-off from Souda Bay in Greece, the plane flew over Bulgaria, the Black Sea, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Norway before conducting a usual sortie outside the Murmansk region, home to Russia’s ballistic missile submarines.
From there, the plane made it back to its home base Waddington military air base in England. […]
Except in Norway’s northeastern corner, the plane approached close the Belarus and Russian border over Poland, the Baltics, Finland and the Barents Sea. Norway has self-imposed restraint on NATO activity near its border with Russia. The UK plane therefor had to circumnavigate to west of Tana and Varanger before flying eastwards again in international airspace over the Barents Sea. Läs artikel