Блог Александра Шакуна

Sitrep for 28 March with additional information and comments added in the next 5 days.

This is the 2nd part of a dedicated overview on air missions carried in proximity to Russian borders, (NATO members and Sweden), principally intelligence-gathering missions, supported by air tankers in the area.  

Flights details were obtained from various social media aircraft tracking accounts. The variety of intelligence gathering flights, (SIGINT, ELINT, ASW and AEW), tracked were mostly either over the waters of the Baltic,  Black Sea and more rarely, the Barents Seas. 

The 1st part of this series: Air missions along Russian borders — snapshot of January 2021

This short analysis outlines a recent small but subtle “sea change” in Russian naval deployments that took place recently.

Firstly, the list below outlines an abridged overview of the current elements underpinning Russian naval policies to date:

·  The backbone of the Russian Navy lies in its multipronged capacity to field a range of ships, to support its littoral defence and also deploy primarily in the near sea zone.  

·  A noticeable shift towards “distributed lethality”, with smaller but more versatile combat ships, with smaller corvettes and patrol boats as part of the mix as well as destroyers and the vitally important submarine fleet. 

·  Continued development and deployment of (shipborne) long-range stand-off missiles, coupled with the advances in Russian missile technology.

·  Ensuring a wide distribution of firepower and spreading out the risks to minimise big potential combat losses. [1] 

These are some of the current and anticipated elements that are relevant to this article, (I’m not covering the submarine fleet aspect).  Generally speaking, recent Russian naval developments can cover both power projection and sea control as well as sea denial capabilities closer to home.

This is part of a series on air missions carried in proximity to Russian borders, (NATO members and Sweden), principally intelligence-gathering missions, supported by air tankers.  Flights tracked were mostly either over the waters of the Baltic,  Black and more rarely, Barents Seas. 

The latest briefing follows on an article written back in May 2020, [1] with several visuals included. This time, I have attached graphs showing an overview of the situation, as seen and reported by social media aircraft tracking accounts. 

End of year update for the statistics and data presented by the Russian Ministry of Defence and Red Star.

In light of the frequent air missions carried out by the USAF and USN recently, an update is provided connected to my previous article back in May on statistics for 2019 and open source coverage of air reconnaissance & intel gathering air missions for April and May 2020.   Emotions run high on social media on both sides, but it is nevertheless interesting to take a cold look at the official figures given by the Russian MoD in their weekly infographics. 

It is almost impossible to compare the figures below with the scarce information sources made publicly available by the USAF, USN and NATO.  I can only obtain some tidbits of data from open source aviation monitoring sites on Twitter, which is comprehensive but still doesn't quite tell the whole story. 

More on this later on but please note the above graph only refers to air reconnaissance and intelligence gathering missions from U.S., NATO and non-NATO states. Significant by its omission are statistics on strategic bomber missions carried in proximity to Russian borders. 

To be updated... TBC