U.S. and NATO spy flights shown near Russia amid war in Ukraine
Russia and Ukraine: In light of the continuing conflict in Ukraine, the United States and its European allies have been conducting covert operations along NATO‘s eastern border this week in order to gather information on Russia’s military capabilities.
On Monday and Tuesday, the airplane monitoring service Flightradar24 recorded at least three espionage flights. One was an RC-135W “Rivet Joint” of the Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom; the other two, an RQ-4B “Global Hawk” and an RC-135U “Combat Sent,” belonged to the U.S. Air Force.
According to the U.S. Air Force, the “Rivet Joint” can detect, identify, and geolocate signals across the electromagnetic spectrum, while the “Combat Sent” gathers technical information about foreign military radar emitter systems. They are reconnaissance airframes from the RC-135 series.
With a flying duration of almost 34 hours, the “Global Hawk” is an unmanned aerial vehicle designed for high altitude operations. Its integrated sensor suite offers worldwide all-weather, day-or-night intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities as well as continuous near-real-time coverage.
According to airplane monitoring information, two of the three espionage flights took place on Monday. The British “Rivet Joint” took off from the Waddington air station in England, passed through the airspace of Germany and the Netherlands, and then crossed the seas of the Baltic Sea near the Polish coast.
The plane entered Lithuania instead of Kaliningrad, Russia, which is positioned between Poland and Lithuania, two NATO members. It traveled south, once again avoiding Kaliningrad, and arrived in Poland. At the end of its five and a half-hour journey, it returned to base.
In the meanwhile, the US “Global Hawk” took off from the Italian island of Sicily’s Sigonella air base. The surveillance drone passed over Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and finally arrived in Poland. It looped over the region bordering Belarus and flew along the country’s eastern border.
Based on flight tracking data, the “Global Hawk” trip lasted eighteen hours. In 2014, a drone of the same kind completed the longest unrefueled flight in U.S. Air Force history, a 34.3-hour flight.
The “Combat Sent” made its debut on Tuesday from the temporary location it has been residing at since its arrival in the UK last month—the Mildenhall air base in England. According to flight monitoring data, the aircraft followed the same route as the “Rivet Joint” from the day before, but it traveled farther north and ended up in Latvia.
Based on tracking data, Newsweek’s graphic shows Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, following the flights of the “Combat Sent” and the “Rivet Joint” over the Baltic area. The former trip, designated RRR7202, lasted almost five and a half hours, while the later flight, designated JAKE27, did the same.
The NATO spy flights are a response to Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, who warned on Sunday that his nation had a “clear intent” to alter its nuclear war strategy. Ryabkov said that the decision was made in response to Western “adversaries” escalating the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
