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Comment by djxfade | Hacker News Reader

Russian airforces regularly violates NATO airspace in Norway. They never get any consequences for it, so why wouldn't they?

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Would love some sources on that, because that would be a big issue. Russians regularly fly in international airspace along the Norwegian coast and are intercepted there by Norwegian fighters, but I have never heard about them actually violating Norwegian airspace. This is the closest I know of:

https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/security/2019/02/11-russia...

You can find tons of data on that on Google, maybe not Norway but EU airspace. It happens about once a day.

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/russian-aircraft-violate-eur...

Headline: "NATO says Russian aircraft violated European airspace nearly 300 times in 2019"

Article: "NATO jets intercepted Russian planes flying close to NATO airspace nearly 300 times in 2019, an alliance official said"

These do not mean the same thing.

thank you. and to take this analysis a step further, claims of borders are also not static or a-political. (c.f. Kashmir). Wikipedia keeps a list of these [0]. On the other side of Asia, China makes a larger claim of maritime territory than the US recognizes...and the US Navy regularly sales through those waters [1].

I would encourage people to make a 2 by 2 matrix for soem perspective. Pick two country's...on one axis and put both on there as the 'violated' border and the 'violator' on the other. write headlines for all four boxes.

and to be clear to anyone not reading the parent. The headline and article wearywanderer mentions are literal quotes. The headline is the headline, and the quote from the article is literally the first sentence. They don't match as a factual matter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_disputes

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-says-us-warship-il...

PRC took part in negotiating UNCLOS from 1973 to 1982, and ratified in 1996. They recognized the territories of other countries when they ratified it.

There are more sources that are more explicit about crossing into the airspace.

- https://news.err.ee/1608203641/russian-aircraft-violates-est... - https://euobserver.com/tickers/126198

etc...

It's happened a couple of times to Sweden which while not in NATO is in EU (and is generally considered a close ally to NATO).

Sources in Swedish:

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/tre-ryska-militarflygplan...

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/expressen-ryskt-stridsfly...

Because a MiG firing on a NATO-country airplane that's in NATO airspace is definitely sound reason of invoking NATO Art 5

There is an enormous leap between "violating airspace" and "shooting down a passenger plane while violating airspace"

The Russians, via their proxies in Ukraine, blew up an airliner a few years back.

But only through carelessness. They thought they were shooting at a Ukrainian military transport plane.

No carelessness, that's exactly what they were told to do: shoot down everything that flies. That was their explicit order.

Russia had no reasons to take down that plane. The air space was open with planes flying over Donbas every day. A bunch of monkeys mistook it for a Ukrainian military plane and blew it up.

No, it was an explicit order, close down the airspace no matter what. This implied shooting everything that flies in the most literal sense. They knew fully they were shooting a civilian plane.

In the celebratory Facebook post right after the shooting they claimed it was a military transport. In the intercepted cell phone call by a militant to a commander from the crash site they find out it's a civilian plane because they find the bodies and luggage.

https://www.cnn.com/2014/07/18/world/europe/ukraine-mh17-int...

Do you have a source for that?

The official investigation concluded it was a mistake by poorly trained soldiers who thought they were downing a military An-26 plane.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17

Sources are in Russian. Russian separatists told shortly after the incident:

"В районе Тореза только что сбили самолет Ан-26, валяется где-то за шахтой Прогресс. Предупреждали же - не летать в "нашем небе". А вот и видео-подтверждение очередного "птичкопада". Птичка упала за террикон, жилой сектор не зацепила. Мирные люди не пострадали. А также еще есть информация о втором сбитом самолете, вроде бы Су", - говорится в сообщении Стрелкова.

"In the area of Torez, an An-26 plane has just been shot down, lying somewhere behind the Progress mine. We warned not to fly in our sky. And here is a video confirmation of the next birdfall. Civilians were not injured. And there is also information about the second downed plane, like Su, "- said in the message of Strelkov.

Also https://youtu.be/_rbzlMeGToI?t=83 the "Cossack" referred in other tapes as a unit commander to whom the battery belonged pretty much says "and so? fuck them, we'll say they are spies, it's war"

It's surprising to see it being 7 years since, and there are still people from the West still dead convinced in finding "alternative facts."

There is one, and only ground truth. A battery had an order to "shoot everything that flies," and that's what they did within hours of the order.

What? Look at the transcript again, they're wondering why it's a civilian plane and not an An-26, and thinking of a way to deal with that...

He is not looking for a way to "deal with it," he very well knows what's going on, and aware of the order, and tell the caller to fuck off.

There is no "alternative facts" there. An order to shoot everything that flies, and they did it.

There are hours, and hours of Ukrainian intercepts, probably listened by every Western intelligence agency 100 times over.

If that doesn't seal the deal, it's for people who fully willingly choosing to believe in a lie for sake of playing a cause celebre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot#:~:text=In%20poli....

Ukrainians blew their extremely valuable intercept source to bring this to attention of the world.

Now, seven year later, EU keeps soiling their pants, and still can't gather enough courage to point a finger on Russia. They are trying their hardest to pretend that they don't know what's going on.

Even if the shutdown was genuinely inadvertent, it would still be a cause for an immediate retaliation to any normal country.

> EU keeps soiling their pants, and still can't gather enough courage to point a finger on Russia

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53367425

https://www.rferl.org/a/dutch-court-rejects-request-to-inves...

I don't think that EU doesn't keep its finger pointed to Russia. Russia is heavily sanctioned already, what do you expect EU to do, invade them ?

And that source confirms the official version? They didn't have orders to shoot down anything, they had orders to shoot down anything of the Ukrainian military.

An-26 is a military cargo plane, a legitimate target in their eyes. Why on earth would they shoot down neutral civilian airliners, of which there were many?

Well what does violating the airspace in pursuit of the passanger plane achieve in this case? Of course the implication is that the MiG could have shot them down.

Russian and NATO air forces regularly violate each others airspace (and the same with Warsaw Pact forces during the Cold War), but not while making even implied specific threats to civil aviation. (Also, though usually, not quite always without consequence, e.g, the Russian aircraft shot down by Turkey in 2015. To be fair, this was on an actual combat mission and not a routine intrusion, but then again neither would the Belarussian intrusion being imagined have been the routine kind.)

There's a difference between countries routinely buzzing airspace with military aircraft to show they can and test the response, and entering airspace with military aircraft to threaten a foreign civilian airliner, which could reasonably be interpreted as an act of war.

Any source?

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