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PARIS — Russian forces threatened to shoot down French pilots patrolling in worldwide airspace over the Black Sea, alerts of more and more aggressive habits from Moscow as its invasion of Ukraine struggles to make headway, France’s protection minister stated Thursday.
The minister, Sébastien Lecornu, didn’t give particular particulars concerning the French flights or plane concerned within the threatened shoot-down. However he stated Russia is returning to a “significantly aggressive” posture harking back to the previous Soviet Union’s habits through the Chilly Battle.
“A month in the past, to offer you a really concrete instance, a Russian air visitors management system threatened to shoot down French plane within the Black Sea once we have been in a free worldwide zone the place we patrol,” he stated on RTL radio.
“The habits of Russia in 2024 bears no relation to what we noticed in 2022 and, clearly, earlier than the aggression in Ukraine,” the minister stated. “It’s defined by the truth that Russia is in issue on the battlefield in Ukraine.”
A French navy spokesman, Col. Pierre Gaudillière, stated Lecornu was referring to an incident in mid-November that concerned one in all France’s 4 large Airborne Warning and Management System, or AWACS, surveillance plane. Gaudillière described the incident as unprecedented for a French flight in that area.
“It was a French AWACS,” flying over worldwide waters within the Black Sea, Gaudillière stated. “By way of a radio it alternate, it was threatened by the Russians.”
“It was a very aggressive radio alternate,” he added. “It is a first.”
French air power pilots repeatedly patrol on the jap flank of NATO, a part of efforts by the 31-nation navy alliance to spice up its defenses since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years in the past come Saturday.
The French flights embody long-range patrols by its AWACS surveillance plane. Flying excessive above the Black Coastline, they use their highly effective radar and different surveillance gear to look throughout to the Crimean Peninsula that was seized from Ukraine by Russia and annexed in 2014. The surveillance flights can spot missile launches, airborne bombing runs and different navy exercise within the Ukraine battle.
Russian pilots have at instances made clear that they don’t like being watched.
In 2022, a Russian fighter jet launched a missile close to a British air power RC-135 Rivet Joint surveillance plane that was flying in worldwide airspace over the Black Sea, Britain’s authorities stated. The US authorities launched video in March 2023 of a Russian fighter jet dumping gas on a U.S. Air Pressure surveillance drone. The drone crashed into the Black Sea.
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Videojournalist Nicolas Garriga contributed from Paris.
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