Only once was an incursion to Turkish airspace. After a warning it was shot down. Never happened again.
You tell me what's the better strategy to deal with Russia.
If you give leeway to a bully, the bully's gonna keep on bullying.
> On 15 October 2015, the Deputy Commander of the Russian Air-Space Force (VKS) visited Turkey to meet his Turkish counterparts. They’ve agreed that Russia would give at least twelve hours’ advance notice of any flight that would take VKS aircraft close to the Turkish-Syrian border. A hotline was also set up for the Turks to use to warn the Russian military if their aircraft came too close to the border.
> Even then, the Turkish tactical commanders played it safe: they called headquarters in Ankara and explained the situation. Two unknown aircraft were approaching, they could not be contacted, and the Russians had not announced any flights.
> What a surprise the Turks then drew the logical conclusion: the two jets could only belong to the Syrian Arab Air Force.
> It was only later - once the images from a Turkish TV team on site were published - that there was clarity: the AIM-120C has hit a Russian-, not a Syrian jet.
> It’s a mistake to think that on 24 November 2015 the Turks have had enough of the Russians and thus opened fire. No. They’ve opened fire and shot down that Su-24 precisely because they’ve trusted the Russians: they’ve trusted the Russians would stick to their arrangement, they were convinced the Russians would never-ever do be as sloppy as to forget announcing their flight, and were convinced they’re shooting at the Assadists.
I don't think shooting down aircraft that severely violate NATO airspace is overreacting. It's what Russia would do to NATO aircraft violating their airspace. I think everything Russia does should be responded with a measure of similar size. Being overly careful with Russia hasn't worked very well at all historically.
The Ukraine war doesn't make him look very good in Russia - a lot of dead Russians and burning oil facilities in return for occupying some bombed out land where the people hate them.
If he gets into a low level fight with NATO then he can sell it at home that they are in a noble war with a much larger enemy rather than getting beat up by a small and largely peaceful neighbor they chose to attack.
The strategic option for NATO is probably to mostly ignore Russian planes and drones flying near them but respond by helping Ukraine win.
(Or personally I'd like if they took out Putin but that doesn't seem the done thing. Better to kill a hundred thousand innocents than the guilty one seems to be the thing.)
“Unknown aircraft, you were detected…” then radar lock warning if they’re lucky.
But IMO NATO gets to do the same - get a better digital and radar signature from offending aircraft, monitor coms, spy on command chain, etc.
On a radar screen, that is indistinguishable from a first-strike scenario until the very moment it isn't.
So please... think twice before repeating this "Bullies need to get slapped once" nonsense. Because if someone in Pyongyang, Beijing, or Moscow ever agrees with that logic for even a heartbeat, we're not talking about one downed plane - we're talking about World War III.
This isn't a schoolyard where you teach someone a moral lesson. It's a nuclear standoff where one hot-headed mistake can erase every living thing on Earth.
Deterrence requires discipline, not chest-beating bravado.
There is also no place called „Gielenkirchen“. It‘s likely a typo of „Geilenkirchen“, which indeed does have a NATO base. But it is also at the German/Dutch border, while the article places it at the German/Polish border.
I am questioning the rest of the article based on these findings. They are straight-forward to check before publishing.
This should also have triggered the 'fact checker alarm bells' because there are no NATO bases in the area of former East Germany to this day (honoring the agreement with the late Soviet Union to not station foreign NATO troops in former East Germany - e.g. the only "no NATO East expansion promise" that actually exists in writing) - and AFAIK apart from the Eurofighter Luftwaffengeschwader 73 in Rostock-Laage (also not exactly close to the Polish border) there is no presence of the German airforce in East Germany either.
Although tbf, the sentence could also be read as the Geilenkirchen-based AWACS plane operating several hundred kilometers back (from Estonia) near the German/Polish border - which I guess makes a lot more sense than moving Geilenkirchen several hundred kilometers to the east :)
In any case I agree that it's a poorly written article and should be classified as fiction until confirmed by more reliable sources.
It literally happened again the following month. Is this an AI generated article or something?
What actually happened:
- A group of 40 year old Russian interceptors flew just beyond the airspace border, to test NATO response times.
- NATO responded and revealed capabilities
- someone in Russian military R&D got new data to work with.
Also doubtful tbh because such interceptions (although without actual airspace violation) happen every other week over the Baltic Sea. It might have been the first time F-35s were used(?), but I really doubt they took off their radar reflectors to 'reveal capabilities'.
To probably quote Terry Pratchett, at least it is proper-ganda.
Propaganda can be done by both your enemies and your own side, and the later is the most dangerous one. The more you like it, the more skeptical you should be.
Which, by the way, is all conjecture. Even if everything happened as described (citation needed), they have no idea what the Russians knew. For a piss-them-off mission like this, watching the response and playing dumb seems far wiser than reacting.
