Important Takeaways:
- France Says Russia Threatened to Shoot Down Its Military Aircraft
- Russian forces threatened to shoot down French flights patrolling last month in international airspace over the Black Sea, signals of increasingly aggressive behavior from Moscow as its invasion of Ukraine struggles to make headway, France’s defense minister said Thursday.
- French flights include long-range patrols by its AWACS surveillance aircraft. Flying high above the Black Sea coast, they use their powerful radar and other surveillance gear to peer across to the Crimean Peninsula that was seized from Ukraine by Russia and annexed in 2014. The surveillance flights can spot missile launches, airborne bombing runs and other military activity in the Ukraine conflict.
- Russian pilots have at times made clear that they don´t like being watched.
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Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.
Important Takeaways:
- Taiwan responds to China’s unprecedented military activity as US destroyer makes moves
- Late Monday, the Taiwan Defense Ministry registered 91 fighter jets and 12 ships from the Chinese military within the space of 12 hours. This is a record-high number of Chinese military aircraft entering the airspace surrounding Taiwan in a single day.
- Of these, 54 aircraft crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait and entered Taiwan’s south-western and south-eastern airspace.
- After Tsai returned from California to Taipei, China launched three-day military exercises on Saturday. They included simulating several precision strikes on “key targets on the island of Taiwan and surrounding sea areas.”
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Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.
Important Takeaways:
- Turkey Escalating Aggression against Greece: 90 Overflights in One Day
- Turkish military aircraft violated Greek airspace 90 times in one day, on April 15, and conducted three overflights of inhabited Greek islands, according to Greek media.
- Turkish aircraft have, in fact, been violating Greek airspace almost non-stop since the beginning of the year. In fact, Turkey — both its government and political opposition — has for years openly been threatening to capture Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.
- The legal status of the Greek islands in the Aegean is clear: The Treaty of Lausanne set the borders of Turkey and Greece, with the exception of the then-Italian occupied Dodecanese islands that reunited with Greece in 1947 following the signing of the Paris Peace Treaty between Italy and the World War II Allies.
- Turkey, however, invaded northern Cyprus in 1974, forcibly displaced the Greek Christians living there, and has been maneuvering to acquire the rest. In 2018, Turkey also invaded northern Syria and, using jihadist paramilitary forces, has been occupying the region ever since.
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MOSCOW (Reuters) – President Vladimir Putin on Thursday promised to strengthen the army and supply it with new generation weapons, as he traveled to watch Russia’s biggest war games since the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Vostok-2018 (East-2018) drills taking place in eastern Siberia close to the border with China involve 300,000 Russian troops as well as joint exercises with the Chinese army.
“This is the first time our army and fleet have undergone such a difficult and large-scale test,” Putin said in comments published on the Kremlin website.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (L) and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu oversee the Vostok-2018 (East-2018) military drills at Tsugol firing range in Zabaikalsky Region, Russia September 13, 2018. Sputnik/Alexei Nikolsky/Kremlin via REUTERS
The exercises, that involve over a thousand military aircraft as well as up to 36,000 tanks, come amid tense relations between Russia and the West that have fallen to a post-Cold War low.
Addressing a gathering of the soldiers, Putin said Russia was a peaceful country ready for cooperation with any state interested in partnership, but that it was a soldier’s duty to be ready to defend his country and its allies.
“Therefore we are going to further strengthen our armed forces, supply them with the latest generations of weapons and equipment, develop international military partnership,” Putin said.
(Reporting by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Keith Weir)
