Russian Bombers Buzz U.S. Airspace During Obama Visit

This is unsettling.

But perhaps no review of Obama’s visit to Russia is quite as informative as the one contained in this report on an address by the Commander of the U.S. Alaska Command, in Fairbanks on July 14. Air Force Lt. Gen. Dana Atkins, speaking of the significant increase in Russian long-range bomber flights since 2007, provided the following details on the tally of such flights in 2009:
This year, there have been 13 Russian bomber flights near Alaska, some of which included fighter escorts, Atkins said.In the past, it would be “politically embarrassing” for the Russians to conduct such flights while a U.S. leader is visiting the Russian president, but the general said the Russians conducted three such flights during President Obama’s recent visit to Moscow. He said the Russian “disappointment” in recent U.S. actions could be behind the increased number of flights. “Maybe they’re trying to do things to disappoint us or give them greater global clout,” Atkins said.
There has indeed, as Lt. Gen. Atkins says, been a longstanding convention that Russia and the U.S. suspend long-range strategic bomber flights for summit meetings. This interestingly-timed series of flights comes on the heels of a Russian bomber flight in February that skirted Canadian airspace hours before Obama’s first visit with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa.Canadians focused their analysis on Russia’s Arctic interests, which Moscow has, increasingly, been asserting with displays of military force. But other factors merit consideration. The bomber flights during Obama’s Russia visit occurred at the end of a seemingly unconnected major Russian exercise in the Caucasus: Kavkaz-2009, a replay of the Kavkaz exercise in 2008 that positioned Russian troops for the invasion of Georgia. Kavkaz-2009 is the largest Russian exercise since Soviet days, and its preparations may presage a recurrence of last year’s sequence of events

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