- Jan 10, 2002
- 18,191
- 3
- 0
Show of strength or taunting or just testing their equipment?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2400345.ece
The RAF scrambled to intercept eight Russian nuclear bombers heading for Britain yesterday in the biggest aerial confrontation between the two countries since the end of the Cold War.
The Tupolev-95 Bear bombers were approaching in formation when they were met by four Tornado F3 fighter jets. Defence sources said that the Russian pilots turned away as soon as they spotted the approaching Tornados and did not enter British airspace.
Norway had earlier sent four F16 jets to shadow the Russians as they neared its airspace in what Moscow insisted was a training mission. The bombers had flown over international waters from the Barents Sea to the Atlantic before heading for Britain.
Russian Bears flying in pairs have triggered several alerts this year as they neared the 12-mile British airspace zone, but this was the first time that so many bombers had simultaneously tested British air defences.
The exercise is expensive for the RAF. It costs more than £40,000 an hour to fly a Tornado F3 and yesterday?s operation will have cost at least £160,000. Underlining the scale of the operation, the RAF also sent up an airborne early warning aircraft (Awacs) and a VC10 tanker so that the Tornados could be refuelled.
Colonel Alexander Drobyshevsky, a spokesman for Russia?s air force, said that 14 long-range bombers began missions over the Pacific, Atlantic and Arctic oceans on Wednesday night.
In an echo of the Cold War chess game that the Soviet Union and Nato played continuously in the skies around Europe, he acknowledged that ?virtually all of our strategic planes are being shadowed by Nato fighters?.
He later told Interfax that up to 20 Nato jets had scrambled to intercept the Russian aircraft. Colonel Drobyshevsky had announced on Monday that a dozen bombers would practice firing cruise missiles over the Arctic.
This was Russia?s biggest show of strength since President Putin ordered strategic air patrols to resume last month. They were suspended in 1992 after the Soviet collapse because the Kremlin could not afford them.
Until Mr Putin?s decision, the RAF?s main air-defence role around Britain had been to ensure that it reacted swiftly to suspicious manoeuvres by commercial airliners approaching British airspace, with a view to countering any hint of a terrorist-related attack.
The flights are the latest example of Mr Putin?s ability to irritate the West with bold strokes that cost the Kremlin little and delight many ordinary Russians, who enjoy seeing Nato discomfited. He has already pulled Russia out of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty on arms limitation, and railed against US proposals to install a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.