NATO bristles at ‘unsafe behavior’ by Russian pilots – POLITICO.eu

Russian Su-27 jet fighters and MIG 29 jet fighters fly over Red Square during the Victory Day military parade in Moscow on May 9, 2016 | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images

Rising concerns come after series of confrontations between allies and Russian aircraft in the crowded airspace over the Baltic Sea.

By David M. Herszenhorn

7/11/17, 6:08 PM CET

Updated 7/11/17, 11:23 PM CET

Increasingly angry NATO allies will tellthe Kremlin on Thursday of their objection toaggressive and dangerous maneuvers by Russian military pilots over the Baltic Sea, including unsafe behavior by Russian pilots on intercepts, an alliance official said.

NATOs frustration over what it views as unnecessary provocations by Russian military aircraft will be conveyed ata meeting in Brussels of the NATO-Russia Council, a forum in which Western allies and Russia maintain dialogueeven amid heightened tensions.

NATOs rising concerns come after a series of confrontations between allies and Russian aircraft in the crowded airspace over the Baltic Sea, including an incident last month in which a Russian Su-27 fighter jet came within several feet of a U.S. RC-135 reconnaissance plane. The Pentagon released dramatic photos of that incident.

The NATO official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the actions by Russian pilots would be among severalconcerns raised by allies in Thursdays meeting. Allies are also bristling over plans by Russia for a large-scale military exercise, called Zapad, or West, which NATO officials say should be reported under a 2011 international accord known as the Vienna Document.

TheVienna Document, agreed by membersof the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which includes Russia and NATO allies, calls for official notice of exercises exceeding 9,000 troops and allows OSCE states to observe any exercises involving more than 13,000 soldiers.

NATO officials said they believed that Russias Zapad exercises would involve about 100,000 troops but that the Kremlin was dividing up the drills so it could claim not to be exceeding the threshold for notification or observation.

Relations between Russia and the West have been deeply strained since Russiasinvasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ensuing warin eastern Ukraine, in which Moscow has backed opponents of the Ukrainian government.

In response to an inquiry from POLITICO, a spokeswoman for the Russian mission to NATO said she couldonly confirm that the meeting of the NATO-Russia Council was scheduled for Thursday.

Because the airspace over the Baltic Sea is among the most crowded on the planet, civilian aviation regulators have worked out agreements by which Russian military aircraft traveling to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad stay within a pre-determined corridor. Other countries have complained that Russian military aircraft were often traveling without using transponders or making radio contact, creating dangerous conditions for passenger jets.

NATOs most senior uniformed officer, General Petr Pavel, the chairman of the NATO military committee, has said that the actions by Russian pilots created undue risks.

There is always risk that something will go wrong when two forces that are not friendly are too close to each other and we are close to each other not only in the Baltic Sea airspace but in the Black Sea airspace, all around the border in Syria, Pavel said at a POLITICO Playbook breakfast interview.

In most of these cases, we havent been observing the situation thatwould be clearly hostile against NATO. There are some violations of airspace, not necessarily incursion into NATO territory, but we are mostly witnessing what we call non-professionalbehavior in the air.

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NATO bristles at 'unsafe behavior' by Russian pilots - POLITICO.eu