Moscow. December 27. INTERFAX-AVN - Targeted provocations of the North Atlantic Alliance near the Russian borders are highly likely to escalate into an armed conflict, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said.
"Recently, the alliance has switched to the practice of direct provocations involving a high risk of escalating into an armed confrontation," Fomin said on Monday at a briefing for military attaches and representatives of embassies of foreign states accredited in Moscow.
As a typical example, he cited the attempt of the British destroyer URO Defender on June 23, 2021 to penetrate into the territorial waters of the Russian Federation in the area of Cape Fiolent off the coast of Crimea.
"It is significant that the actions of the ship of the British Navy were provided by the American strategic reconnaissance aircraft RC-135," Fomin said
According to him, in the Black Sea region, compared with 2020, the intensity of the use of reconnaissance aircraft has increased by more than 60 percent. The number of flights increased from 436 to 710. Strategic bombers B-IB and B-52N of the XIIIA Air Force flew 92 times against 78 in 2020 in the airspace of the Black Sea region with access to the conditional boundary of the use of weapons. "The minimum approach to the Russian border in the western part of Crimea was 15 kilometers," Fomin said.
The scale and intensity of operational and combat training activities according to NATO plans in the Black Sea zone are increasing. "In total, this year the command of the NATO Joint Armed Forces conducted 15 exercises in the Black Sea. In 2020, there were eight of them," Fomin said.
The presence of ships and auxiliary vessels of non-regional NATO states in the Black Sea, according to him, "has actually acquired a permanent character." "From January to December of this year, 30 visits of NATO ships were made, in 2020 there were 23 of them. The total length of stay was more than 400 days, in 2020 - 359," Fomin said.
In the Baltic Sea zone in 2021, NATO countries made more than 1,200 sorties and more than 50 sorties of warships for naval reconnaissance. In the region in 2021, the command of the NATO Joint Armed Forces conducted more than 20 operational and combat training events. "At the same time, neutral states and our closest neighbors, Finland and Sweden, are actively involved in coalition activities," Fomin said.
He also stressed that after the US withdrawal from the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-range Missiles, NATO actually ignored the initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin to impose a moratorium on the deployment of new medium-range and shorter-range missiles in Europe and the possibility of developing mutual verification measures to address existing concerns. "The deployment of such missiles in Europe is unlikely to increase NATO's security," Fomin stressed.
