MOSCOW – At least three American reconnaissance aircraft were spottednear Russia’s southern and western borders on 1 May, the online aircraftmonitoring resource PlaneRadarreports.
A US Air Force Boeing RC-135V, a large reconnaissance aircraft based in theUK, flew near the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea at 12:00Moscow time, travelling at 692 kilometres per hour.
The plane made its reconnaissance flight at an altitude of almost eightkilometres.
In addition, a US Navy P-8A Poseidon anti-submarine patrol aircraft tookoff from NATO’s Sigonella base in Sicily, Italy on Tuesday, and made itsway to the vicinity of Novorossiysk, a Russian port city on the Black Sea.
Shortly after, the plane conducted a three-hour reconnaissance flightnear Crimea’s southern borders, moving at a speed of almost 567 kilometresper hour at an altitude of about 4.6 kilometres.
Separately, a US Air Force RQ-4B-40 Global Hawk drone took off from a basein Italy and flew near eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region before headingto Russia’s Black Sea coast.
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Tuesday’s flights were the latest in a series of such missions carriedout by the US military in the past few months.
The US and NATO have substantially increased their reconnaissanceoperations along Russia’s borders in the Black and Baltic Seas, as wellas around Russian military facilities in Syria, in recent years.
The past year has seen 3,000 foreign combat aircraft, including about 1,000spy planes, flying near Russia’s maritime and land borders. The RussianDefence Ministry has repeatedly called on the Pentagon to put an endto such flights; however, these requests were dismissed by Washington.
