FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
KIEV – In military jargon it is called «scramble» the operation that the Italian fighters carried out in the mornings of the last two days in the skies of Baltic Sea. A routine action to verify the intentions of the Russian jets that flew in international skies and still remained far from NATO territory. In normal times it would be a routine operation, one like many for our pilots of the 4th Wing Air Task Force deployed with NATO at the Polish air base in Malbork, not far from Gdansk, who have been flying on Eurofighters for a few weeks. But today the tension with Fly is skyrocketing and every action involves risks and attention that must be continually evaluated.
“It happened on both the morning of March 28th and 29th. Each time it was around 8am when the alarm went off. The radars had intercepted an unidentified aircraft and our two planes immediately took off to check it. We are always ready to operate 24 hours a day, as if we were air police. Our pilots identified them as Russians and then returned to base. There was no friction, the Russian planes never entered the NATO areas”, military sources in Malbork tell us. The Italian aviation contingent has less than 200 personnel and has been operating in Poland since November as part of the NATO Enhanced Air Policing mission. Initially he used i F35 fighter. Since mid-February it has been equipped with four Eurofighters and for a few days it has been commanded by Colonel Gianluigi Colucci.
The Malbork base was built by the Soviets at the height of the Cold War: next to the new heated NATO hangars there are still the old Russian bunkers with the symbols of the communist regime and a large part of the local Polish wing uses the Soviet-made Mig-29 modernized with latest model radar and navigation systems. “Our task is also to monitor the area of the Suwalki Corridor which the NATO commands consider fundamental for the security of the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe”, the Italian officers we met on the Malbork airstrip in mid-January told us. A delicate task. The Suwalki Gap is a corridor a few tens of kilometers wide that connects Poland to the Baltic States between north-western Belarus and the Russian area of Kaliningrad. Recently, NATO listening centers had intercepted some Russian military communications in which a war scenario aimed at the rapid conquest of the corridor was hypothesized.
But Italian flights have been concentrated on the Baltic since November. “The situation has changed since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moscow fears the enlargement of NATO to Sweden and Finland and tends to maintain a continuous presence of military aircraft over the Baltic to guarantee ship access to its ports”, the Italian officials told us at the time. The interceptions of the last few days are therefore part of a growing phenomenon.
