NATO Ended Russia's Estonian Air Incursions

https://themilitaryanalyst.com/2025/11/13/the-real-story-how-nato-ended-russias-estonian-air-incursions/

by madspindel • 8 months ago

92 49 8 months ago

chmod775• 8 months ago

I do enjoy some military fiction as much as the next guy, but without some sources this might as well just be that.

mckirk• 8 months ago

This reads cool and all, but I also can't help help but feel like it might not have been as much of a 'gotcha' as the text makes it out to be. Who knows what kind of information the Russians got from this episode. The closer the NATO response is to what would actually happen in a combat scenario, the more valuable such a provocation is to them, I suspect.

tgv• 8 months ago

The author does have a point about making incursions so normal we no longer react to them.

butler14• 8 months ago

And that’s before you even get to the asymmetric costs.

catlikesshrimp• 8 months ago

It might have been generated. It reads exactly like some generic voice talking on FB. I am on the side of this propaganda, but it's propagansa.

a3w• 8 months ago

Useless propaganda piece.

To probably quote Terry Pratchett, at least it is proper-ganda.

jryle70• 8 months ago

When you like something, it's engaging and informative. When you don't, well, call it propaganda. I suppose anything is propaganda, since nothing is pure facts.

littlestymaar2• 8 months ago

I'd rather have a sourced analysis of something I don't like than read a dude writing an unsourced cheering post celebrating how powerful my army is.

Propaganda can be done by both your enemies and your own side, and the later is the most dangerous one. The more you like it, the more skeptical you should be.

torginus3• 8 months ago

Have you never read anything that supported your general worldview, yet it did so using populist and deliberately deceptive talking points?

cookiengineer• 8 months ago

For the last 60 years, Russia behaved like this to test NATO's defenses constantly.

Only once was an incursion to Turkish airspace. After a warning it was shot down. Never happened again.

You tell me what's the better strategy to deal with Russia.

If you give leeway to a bully, the bully's gonna keep on bullying.

hnaccount_rng2• 8 months ago

But neither was it only one incursion into Turkish airspace, not did Turkey not pay a price for it

ivandenysov• 8 months ago

What price did Turkey pay for shooting down a Russian military plane on their territory?

throwuxiytayq3• 8 months ago

Very common but not very thoughtful sentiment. You are missing the frankly obvious point that Russia wants NATO to overreact, giving them the ability to continue internally escalating the conflict, to increase their already strained mobilization effort, et cetera. Do you think Russia somehow forgot about the Turkey situation?

rwyinuse• 8 months ago

It's also pretty obvious that Russia respects only strength. If NATO doesn't react strongly enough, it is perceived weak by Russia, which increases the likelihood of them trying something against a NATO country.

I don't think shooting down aircraft that severely violate NATO airspace is overreacting. It's what Russia would do to NATO aircraft violating their airspace. I think everything Russia does should be responded with a measure of similar size. Being overly careful with Russia hasn't worked very well at all historically.

tim333• 8 months ago

I was thinking that. The most plausible reasoning I've seen for Russia's recent behavior along those lines is Putin is mostly concerned with his personal power and position in Russia.

The Ukraine war doesn't make him look very good in Russia - a lot of dead Russians and burning oil facilities in return for occupying some bombed out land where the people hate them.

If he gets into a low level fight with NATO then he can sell it at home that they are in a noble war with a much larger enemy rather than getting beat up by a small and largely peaceful neighbor they chose to attack.

The strategic option for NATO is probably to mostly ignore Russian planes and drones flying near them but respond by helping Ukraine win.

(Or personally I'd like if they took out Putin but that doesn't seem the done thing. Better to kill a hundred thousand innocents than the guilty one seems to be the thing.)

throaway95• 8 months ago

Shooting down a plane violating NATO airspace is the correct reaction, not an overreaction.

dist-epoch2• 8 months ago

The Turkish incident is more complex:

On 15 October 2015, the Deputy Commander of the Russian Air-Space Force (VKS) visited Turkey to meet his Turkish counterparts. They’ve agreed that Russia would give at least twelve hours’ advance notice of any flight that would take VKS aircraft close to the Turkish-Syrian border. A hotline was also set up for the Turks to use to warn the Russian military if their aircraft came too close to the border.
Even then, the Turkish tactical commanders played it safe: they called headquarters in Ankara and explained the situation. Two unknown aircraft were approaching, they could not be contacted, and the Russians had not announced any flights.
What a surprise the Turks then drew the logical conclusion: the two jets could only belong to the Syrian Arab Air Force.
It was only later - once the images from a Turkish TV team on site were published - that there was clarity: the AIM-120C has hit a Russian-, not a Syrian jet.
It’s a mistake to think that on 24 November 2015 the Turks have had enough of the Russians and thus opened fire. No. They’ve opened fire and shot down that Su-24 precisely because they’ve trusted the Russians: they’ve trusted the Russians would stick to their arrangement, they were convinced the Russians would never-ever do be as sloppy as to forget announcing their flight, and were convinced they’re shooting at the Assadists.

https://xxtomcooperxx.substack.com/p/the-russian-sloppiness

torginus3• 8 months ago

Wasn't Russia on Assad's side? The ally of my enemy is also my ally does read kinda weird.

instagib• 8 months ago

Nearly everyone does this testing each other, their equipment, responses, verify doctrines etc.

“Unknown aircraft, you were detected…” then radar lock warning if they’re lucky.

beefnugs• 8 months ago

Why shoot a plane down when you can spend untold $trillians on superior everything for many years and write a fanfic story about it someday, just as russia gets good at unmanned drones and bypassess all that jazz the same year

DocTomoe3• 8 months ago

Just wait until you learn that flying straight towards an opponent's border to trigger defensive systems, then turning away in the last literal second, is Standard Operating Procedure of US aircraft around North Korea, China, and Russia.

On a radar screen, that is indistinguishable from a first-strike scenario until the very moment it isn't.

So please... think twice before repeating this "Bullies need to get slapped once" nonsense. Because if someone in Pyongyang, Beijing, or Moscow ever agrees with that logic for even a heartbeat, we're not talking about one downed plane - we're talking about World War III.

This isn't a schoolyard where you teach someone a moral lesson. It's a nuclear standoff where one hot-headed mistake can erase every living thing on Earth.

Deterrence requires discipline, not chest-beating bravado.

dzhiurgis• 8 months ago

Russia is gathering intel from NATO this way - measure response times, spy which people get summoned, which systems light up, etc.

But IMO NATO gets to do the same - get a better digital and radar signature from offending aircraft, monitor coms, spy on command chain, etc.

oever• 8 months ago

There is no place called 'Udem' in Germany. There is a place called Uden in the Netherlands. Close to it is the military Volkel Air Base. It has fighter jets and nuclear bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkel_Air_Base

flohofwoe3• 8 months ago

It's a forgivable typo for Uedem, which is in Germany, close to the Dutch border and does indeed house the NATO Combined Air Operations Centre:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uedem

thunfischbrot• 8 months ago

NATO was monitoring the Baltic States air space from ground radars and from a Gielenkirchen based AWACS several hundred kilometers back near the German/Polish border.

There is also no place called „Gielenkirchen“. It‘s likely a typo of „Geilenkirchen“, which indeed does have a NATO base. But it is also at the German/Dutch border, while the article places it at the German/Polish border.

I am questioning the rest of the article based on these findings. They are straight-forward to check before publishing.

flohofwoe3• 8 months ago

...based AWACS several hundred kilometers back near the German/Polish border

This should also have triggered the 'fact checker alarm bells' because there are no NATO bases in the area of former East Germany to this day (honoring the agreement with the late Soviet Union to not station foreign NATO troops in former East Germany - e.g. the only "no NATO East expansion promise" that actually exists in writing) - and AFAIK apart from the Eurofighter Luftwaffengeschwader 73 in Rostock-Laage (also not exactly close to the Polish border) there is no presence of the German airforce in East Germany either.

Although tbf, the sentence could also be read as the Geilenkirchen-based AWACS plane operating several hundred kilometers back (from Estonia) near the German/Polish border - which I guess makes a lot more sense than moving Geilenkirchen several hundred kilometers to the east :)

In any case I agree that it's a poorly written article and should be classified as fiction until confirmed by more reliable sources.

juliangmp• 8 months ago

I'd say the only source listed is the guy who wrote it, but he doesn't even give his actual name...

DocTomoe3• 8 months ago

A bit too horray-patriotic for my tastes.

What actually happened:

- A group of 40 year old Russian interceptors flew just beyond the airspace border, to test NATO response times.

- NATO responded and revealed capabilities

- someone in Russian military R&D got new data to work with.

flohofwoe3• 8 months ago

- someone in Russian military R&D got new data to work with.

Also doubtful tbh because such interceptions (although without actual airspace violation) happen every other week over the Baltic Sea. It might have been the first time F-35s were used(?), but I really doubt they took off their radar reflectors to 'reveal capabilities'.

supermatt• 8 months ago

This is why another similar move hasn’t happened, and why Russia will think twice before it does so again.

It literally happened again the following month. Is this an AI generated article or something?

torginus3• 8 months ago

I think someone should also tell the Russians that.

oliwarner• 8 months ago

If breathlessness was a writing style. Seriously tiring when every other paragraph is a soft trailer for action much later on.

Which, by the way, is all conjecture. Even if everything happened as described (citation needed), they have no idea what the Russians knew. For a piss-them-off mission like this, watching the response and playing dumb seems far wiser than reacting.

NATO Ended Russia's Estonian Air Incursions

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