Russian reconnaissance plane сould have caused air disaster in March - ELN think-tank
Russia is trying to intimidate NATO, London-based think-tank ELN says.
Its latest survey, Dangerous Brinkmanship, notes that what happened to flight MH17 over Ukraine in July almost happened over Sweden three months earlier.
It says that on 3 March an SAS 737 passenger jet, carrying 132 people from Copenhagen to Rome, had a near miss close to Malmo, Sweden, with a Russian reconaissance plane which had failed to transmit its position. It adds that ‘major loss of life’ was avoided only due to ‘good visibility and the alertness of the passenger pilots’.
The report also lists 11 other ‘serious incidents’ which risked ‘escalation’.
According to ELN, up to October this year NATO jets carried out more than 100 intercepts of Russian military aircraft – three times the whole number for last year.
NATO ‘air-police’ also carried out 68 ‘hot identification and interdiction’ operations on the Lithuanian border alone. Latvia recorded more than 150 incidents of Russian planes approaching its airspace, while Russian aircraft violated Estonian air on six occasions.
Russia’s actions amount to ‘intimidation and coercion’ of its neighbours, sending the message, for instance, to Finland and Sweden that there will be ‘more harassment’ if they join the Western military alliance, the survey reads.
The report notes Russia is trying to ‘undermine the confidence’ of Baltic states that NATO is capable of defending them.
The ELN authors urge Russia to cool off and urge NATO to increase military-to-military diplomacy and transparency.
They warn that if, in future, an incident leads to loss of life on either side, it could prompt ‘punitive military action’ and ‘feed a spiral’ of confrontation between ‘a nuclear-armed state and a nuclear-armed alliance’ which ‘may be difficult for either side to fully control or stop’.
