Alarming trend: Russia to open another airbase for fighter jets in Belarus in 2016
Russia is due to establish an airbase in the Belarusian town of Babruysk in 2016 and deploy Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jets, Russian Air Force Commander-In-Chief Colonel General Viktor Bondarev said on Wednesday.
“The airbase of the Russian and Belarusian Air Force will be created in 2016. Su-27 fighter jets will be based there,” Bondarev told news agency TASS during his three-day visit to the facilities under construction.
The Russian aircraft will be stationed at a military airfield, which is expected to be reconstructed.
Russia decided earlier this year to send 24 Su-27SM3 fighter jets to its airbase in Belarus’s Baranavichy in order to ‘provide inviolability of the airspace of the UnionState of Russia and Belarus’.
The first four Russian planes appeared in Baranavichy airfield in December, 2013.
Another 15 jets arrived in Belarus in March, 2014 as a response to the increased activity of NATO troops in Poland and the Baltic States.
