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June 23, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
Russian fighter jets were scrambled 14 times dur- ing the past week to intercept foreign reconnais- sance aircraft near Russian borders, the Russian Defence Ministry said on June 23. The previous week, the ministry reported 18 such incidents.
Russia and Nato quickly blamed each other for aggressive intercepts in the strategically important Baltic region, which saw similar incidents earlier this and last year. In April 2016, a Russian jet came within 9m of the US destroyer Donald Cook con- ducting exercises in the Baltic Sea in what the US navy described as a “simulated attack”. This was one of the closest and riskiest encounters between the countries’ armed forces in recent years.
“Such fly-bys were not uncommon during the Cold War, but their numbers went down after the end of it,” said Harvard’s Saradzhyan. “However,
Moldova, Bulgaria, Poland, Albania, Latvia to lose more than 40% of populations by 2100
threatened by Russia will now materialise. But the current spike in tensions already overshad- ows an anticipated first meeting of presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on the side- lines of the G20 summit in Hamburg on July 7-8.
While the early days of Trump’s presidency in January produced speculation that the two leaders could find common ground when they meet, the situation six months later suggests damage limita- tion and de-escalation could instead be the focus.
“Normally, leaders of countries have at least some low-hanging fruit to pick during their first meeting, in part to prove that their meeting has
a combination of the crisis in Western-Russian relations over Ukraine since 2014 and the longer- term trend of increases in Russia’s defence ex- penditures made them routine again. The more of such fly-bys occur, the greater the chances they’d end up in a collision with losses of lives that would lead to a military confrontation.”
With Western-Russian relations already at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War, any confrontation, even once contained, erodes chanc- es that the sides can resume cooperation in areas of mutual benefit such as counter-terrorism.
“Moreover, such a collision can trigger off an es- calation that could lead to an armed conflict even though the leaders on both sides do not desire such a war – recall all the close calls during the Cuban Missile Crisis,” added Saradzhyan.
yielded concrete positive results for their coun- tries,” Simon Saradzhyan, director of the Russia Matters project at Harvard University’s Belfer Center tells bne IntelliNews. “Given the current atmosphere, including the Russian side’s deci- sion to cancel [the scheduled June 23] closed- door meetings of [US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas’] Shannon and [Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei] Ryabkov to dis- cuss normalisation of the relationship, I have be- gun to doubt whether there will be an opportunity for such low-hanging fruit picking when Trump and Putin meet in Germany.”
The developments mark a worrying stage in rela- tions between Moscow and Washington, tradition- ally difficult over the decades apart from a period of relative detente during the 1990s following the Soviet collapse.
On June 20, Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance’s military exercises with 11,000 troops and scores of ships and aircraft now underway in the Baltic republics and Poland aim to send a strong