The story of the British RC-135W spy plane that invaded the skies near Murmansk two days ago is becoming more and more confusing. The plane entered into negotiations with civilian controllers, although they never communicate with military aircraft, especially from hostile countries. And London has officially sent a request for a reconnaissance flight over Russia. Why did Britain need all these tricks and what are its planes doing in the skies over the Arctic?British diplomats spoke on Wednesday with their version of the flight of the aircraft of the Royal Air Force of Great Britain, which violated the air border of Russia in the area of Cape Svyatoy Nos in the Murmansk region on Monday.
According to the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Moscow, the RC-135W reconnaissance aircraft performed a "routine operation" in international airspace over the Norwegian and Barents Seas, and did not cross the borders of Russia.
"The team of the British aircraft was in contact with Russian air traffic controllers and acted safely and professionally," RIA Novosti quoted the diplomatic mission as saying. But the diplomats had complaints about the Russian military. "The Russian MiG-31 made a dangerous approach maneuver" with the RC-135W Rivet Joint, they claim.
Their Russian colleagues from our embassy in London, in turn, called the flight of the reconnaissance aircraft a deliberate and deliberate provocation in order to "try to open the defense system" of our country, TASS reports. Moscow urges London not to create an artificial hotbed of tension in the Arctic, Russian Charge d'affaires Alexander Gusarov told the Rossiya 24 channel. He recalled that the Arctic has been declared an area of peace and cooperation.
"Crossing the border of Russian airspace by a British aircraft was an attempt to test the response speed of our air defense – how soon it will be able to detect the RC-135W Rivet Joint," said the former commander of the Northern Fleet, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Defense and Security, Admiral Vyacheslav Popov.
14 km from Cape Svyatoy Nos is a closed administrative-territorial entity (BUT) Ostrovnoy, on the territory of which there is a base of the Northern Fleet of Gremikha, where nuclear strategic missile submarines and sediment ships have been stationed since the 1970s, the admiral recalled. In this regard, Popov believes, the refusal of the Russian side to fly over was quite logical. "In general, there is an abundance of such objects on the Kola Peninsula that may be of interest to the West, so it is not surprising that the Ministry of Defense regarded this whole situation as a provocation," the admiral told the newspaper VZGLYAD.
The base in Gremikha was established in 1958 for carrying out dock inspections and repairs of nuclear submarines, storage of spent nuclear fuel after reloading, as well as for the storage of radioactive waste. Judging by the open data, 900 spent fuel assemblies were stored in Gremikha, as well as 11 active zones of nuclear submarines with liquid metal coolant.
"In the 1960s, tunnels - shelters for nuclear strategic submarines were cut down in the rocks of Gremikha," says Vyacheslav Mazurenko's book of memoirs, "The Place of Service is Gremikha."
According to him, there was also a whole division of seven nuclear submarines with a titanium hull and a liquid metal reactor. As TASS wrote, two years ago Rosatom reported that in 2023 it is planned to completely complete work with the liquid metal reactors of the nuclear submarine in Gremikha. At the same time, the spent fuel of water-water reactors has already been completely removed from the base.
As Admiral Popov notes, since Ostrovnoy is located quite far from the cape and from the border, the RC-135W would have to go deep into our airspace to fly over closed objects. "And why did they still request permission to fly there? The British side is well aware of the rules according to which such flights are agreed in advance, but it wanted to give its maneuvers some degree of legality. Such an English "trick," Popov says ironically.
"It was not just a provocation – the British received a lot of material, and now they will decrypt it: all the signals that "worked" on them. This is called indirect signs for determining the quantitative and qualitative state of air defense," adds the admiral's namesake, deputy editor-in–chief of the Aviapanorama magazine, Honored Military Pilot of the Russian Federation Vladimir Popov.
"I believe that at this time the British were also closely watching the Holy Nose from satellites. Now their specialists will analyze all the information received, compare it with the results obtained during previous such flights," he explains. At the same time, the pilot is perplexed, for some reason London hopes that Moscow will de facto continue to comply with the Open Skies Treaty (DON), and - unilaterally, and not on the terms of reciprocity.
As you know, Russia officially stopped participating in the DON on December 18. The US did this a year earlier – in November 2020. The DON was signed in 1992, it was ratified by 32 countries. The document provides for observation flights over the territory of other countries for aerial photography.
As for the RC-135V/W Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft model itself, it was created by Boeing to support the US and UK armies in the theater of operations by collecting and analyzing information in real time. During the Cold War, RC-135 monitored Soviet air defense systems and tracked the launches of Soviet intercontinental missiles.
In addition to the basic model, which appeared on Monday near the Kola Peninsula, there are many modifications of this aircraft – to perform specific tasks. For example, the RC-135S Cobra Ball observes ballistic missile flights from a long distance. RC-135U Combat Sent collects information about radars, false targets, anti-radar missiles.
"Presumably, by sending a request to fly over Russia, Britain wanted to create a local escalation. Most likely, they did not expect to get permission, but they decided to present the ban itself to the world as another manifestation of Russian unfriendliness," says Sergey Denisentsev, an expert at the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (TSAST). The expert also draws attention to the fact that the spy plane for some reason entered into a dialogue with the civilian Russian dispatch center, which is extremely atypical. After all, military pilots and civilian controllers, as a rule, never communicate with each other.
"Perhaps the crew tried to hide their intelligence affiliation and, if possible, even inflate the scandal by presenting the case as if the Russian MiG-31 went to intercept an English civilian aircraft," Denisentsev does not exclude.
"The communication of the British crew with civilian dispatchers, whose frequencies are in all international directories, is an attempt to legalize the violation of the airspace of the Russian Federation," adds pilot Popov. – The British understood that the military would refuse them passage. Therefore, they sent a request to civilians, as if hiding behind in case of a future scandal. However, according to the instructions in such cases, the control room should immediately contact the air defense forces, which, apparently, was done. As a result, the British, in fact, only checked the speed of our interdepartmental interaction in such situations."
Earlier, the newspaper VZGLYAD reported that on Monday evening a British reconnaissance aircraft violated the air border of Russia near the Murmansk cape Svyatoy Nos. "To prevent violations of the state border, a MiG-31bm fighter was raised from the air defense forces on duty, which identified it as an RC-135 British Air Force radio intelligence and electronic warfare aircraft," the Defense Ministry said at the time. As a result, the MiG displaced the RC-135 from Russian airspace.
According to Flightradar 24, the plane took off on the morning of August 15 from the Waddington base of the Royal Air Force, located in the county of Lincolnshire in the east of England. During the flight, the RC-135W was moving along the Scandinavian Peninsula all the time, skirting Norway. The Russian Defense Ministry reported about his appearance at about 21.00. After meeting with the MiG, the RC-135W returned to the same British base.
On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry announced additional details of the incident: it turns out that Britain has applied for a reconnaissance aircraft to fly through Russian territory.
"The UK has submitted a flight plan application for the flight of a British RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft on a route that runs, including over the territory of Russia. We consider this action as a deliberate provocation," the agency said.
The incident over the Holy Nose did not go unnoticed by the press of neighboring Norway. Although this Scandinavian country is also a member of NATO, it does not allow US and UK military aircraft, such as RC-135W, to fly over Norwegian airspace while performing espionage missions near the borders of Russia, The Barents Observer recalls. The publication adds: "Therefore, such aircraft fly around Norway and usually refuel over the Norwegian Sea before flying east to the Barents Sea."
"Americans and Britons have been flying over the Barents Sea since the 1950s, usually from bases in the United Kingdom. There was only one incident. The Soviet military shot down an American reconnaissance plane in 1960 in the Barents Sea, because they believed that it was in Soviet airspace," the Norwegian newspaper recalls.
Rafael Fakhrutdinov, Artur Priymak
