A new report by the European Leadership Network is hyping the number of “dangerous or sensitive” encounters between NATO and Russian military forces in the past eight months, adding to speculation of a new Cold War.
The reports mostly detail Russian warplanes flying close to, but not into, NATO airspace, something which has been happening non-stop for decades. A common story in the Cold War, it never really stopped after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What did stop was attention to the stories, as reports of the warplanes testing one anothers’ airspace only gets reported on the NATO side during those occasions when diplomatic tensions are on the rise.
This is one of those times, and with NATO hyping the Ukraine Civil War as being of Russian manufacture, for the sake of justifying NATO military deployments into Eastern Europe, the stories of 1950’s-era bombers flying near the Scottish coast that used to get buried at the bottom of the news, if reported at all, have recently ended up on the front page.
Unfortunately that makes it impossible to tell if the new report is really detailing unusual activity on the Russia-NATO frontier, or if the only novel part of the story is the amount of hype it is getting.
Western corporate mainstream media — Pure propaganda
The UK Guardian used this report to hype up war against Russia, emphasizing only the provocations by Russia and saying nothing about the fact that NATO nations orchestrated and “$50 million” funded the fascist coup in Ukraine, completely ignoring the preponderance of evidence that the Ukraine fascist military shot down the Malaysian airliner killing all 300 on board.
The idea may well be to remind people in the US just how vulnerable Russia is to NATO attack. People tend to think in terms of WWII, when Hitler's army attcked overland from the west and got bogged down in the vast distances. As the map shows, Russia is highly vulnerable to air attack accross the Arctic from Alaska, Canada and Greenland and it's Pacific coast (the only one with easy access to the world's oceans) is well within striking distance of American territory.
Those TU-95s aren't bombers, and never were. They're signals intelligence collection aircraft, and have been configured as such from the date of construction. For the west to engage in heavy breathing about them is the very height of hypocrisy, as it likewise engages in such flights, more often. The reality is that those missions from both sides are some of the sanest military activities of both parties, allowing an accurate look at the activities of the others. The US uses SIGINT configured C-135s for the same task. They're not tankers any more than the Russian TU-95s are bombers.
"flying close to, but not into, NATO airspace."
Or in other words they are flying in international airspace. So there has been no incursion, intrusion or "encounter" at all.