Russia violating Europe airspace, major report shows

Up to 40 incidents involving the Russian military have occurred in Europe over the last eight months, a major report published Tuesday reveals.

The new report published by the European Leadership Network says incidents include "violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles, narrowly avoided mid-air collisions, close encounters at sea, and other dangerous actions happening on a regular basis over a very wide geographical area."

Apart from routine or near routine encounters, the report identifies "11 serious incidents of a more aggressive or unusually provocative nature, bringing a higher level risk of escalation."

These include harassment of reconnaissance planes, close over-flights over warships and Russian "mock bombing raid" missions.

It also singles out "three high-risk incidents which," in its view, "carried a high probability of causing casualties or a direct military confrontation".

The fact that one of these was a narrowly avoided collision between an SAS civil airliner taking off from Copenhagen and a Russian reconnaissance plane shows that these are not just military games.

The Russian military aircraft was not using a transponder to identify its positions.

NATO planes have regularly intercepted Russian jets over the neutral Baltic sea in recent months. Estonia recorded an incident earlier this year after a Russian jet allegedly entered its airspace without warning. Moscow has denied the accusations.

The second high-risk incident involved the abduction of an Estonian security service operative from a border post on Estonian territory. He was later taken to Moscow and accused of espionage.

The report then points out to the major submarine hunt by the Swedish authorities last month, with the Swedes warning that they were ready to use force to bring any submerged vessel to the surface, the BBC reports.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov blasted NATO's 'limitless' and 'thoughtless' expansion in eastern Europe and claimed it was breaking the rules.

"Instead of making OSCE a normal organization, which would become a real security organization, ensuring security for everyone, our western colleagues took the course of thoughtless, limitless NATO expansion, telling us directly, that legal security guarantees can only be given to those who join the North Atlantic Alliance," Lavrov said in an interview with the Life News TV channel.

(Edited by Rayyan Sabet-Parry)