Last September we risked world war: did the Russian pilot shoot at the English plane over the Black Sea?

The BBC has given a piece of news, worth checking, which shows how close we are to an armed conflict.

A Russian pilot deliberately fired missiles at a Royal Air Force surveillance plane in international airspace over the Black Sea last autumn, British media reported, in an incident that Russia had previously blamed on a "technical malfunction" and which we already told you about last September .

The broadcaster said intercepted communications suggest the pilot of a Russian Su-27 fighter jet fired on the unarmed UK plane in September 2022 after receiving an ambiguous command from a Russian ground control station, and that his co-pilot tried to stop him, but failed.

The British plane that the Russian pilot attempted to shoot was a Boeing RC 135 Rivet Joint equipped with sensors to intercept communications and its crew would have been able to listen to the incident. The plane had 32 people on board and was patrolling the Black Sea. While the US uses drones over the Black Sea, London continues to use manned aircraft.

One step away from war

Here's what the airmen would have recorded on the RC 135 Rivet Joint. As the two Russian SU-27s approached the RAF spy plane, they received a communication from the ground station controller along the lines of “You have the target.”

This ambiguous language was interpreted by one of the Russian pilots as permission to fire.

The Russian pilot then reportedly launched an air-to-air missile, which successfully dropped but failed to lock on to the target. This malfunction may have been caused by the Rivet Joint's electronic defense systems.

At this point the co-pilot would have misspelled words that they had not been authorized to attack.

The first pilot would still have launched a second missile which simply fell from the wing…

In public, British officials downplayed the incident. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told members of Parliament in October that a Russian jet had “launched a missile in the vicinity” of a British plane and that he had asked Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu for an explanation. He then said that according to the Russians "it was a technical malfunction of the Su-27 fighter".

We can only imagine the consequences if the missile had hit the Rivet Joint with 32 British soldiers on board, especially as Eurofighters were in the area.

“We do not view this incident as a deliberate escalation by the Russians, and our analysis agrees that it was due to a malfunction,” Wallace said. He added that the RAF had resumed surveillance patrols over the Black Sea with fighter aircraft escort.

Asked about the report on Thursday, Britain's Ministry of Defense said Wallace had "informed the House of Commons within three weeks of the occurrence of the event, in the interests of transparency and security."

“Our intent has always been to protect the security of our operations, avoid unnecessary escalation and inform the public and the international community,” the ministry said. “This incident is a stark reminder of the potential consequences of Putin's barbaric invasion of Ukraine.”

A spokesman for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Max Blain, said the prime minister was confident Wallace had not misled lawmakers with his statement, adding that "obviously there are limitations on some operational details that can be put into the public domain." for security reasons..

We should ask ourselves why this worrying news has only been made public now. Evidently the British are no longer afraid of showing how close war is.

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The article Last September we risked world war: did the Russian pilot shoot at the English plane over the Black Sea? comes from Economic Scenarios .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/lo-scorso-settembre-abbiamo-rischiato-la-guerra-mondiale-il-pilota-russo-sparo-allaereo-inglese-sul-mar-nero/ on Fri, 15 Sep 2023 05:30:45 +0000.