Two Russian long-range bombers were intercepted off the coast of Alaska by a pair of F-22 Raptor fighter jets on Friday, the military said.
The Tu-95 bombers were flying in the Air Defense Identification Zone in the Bering Sea north of the Aleutian Islands, where they were visually identified and shadowed by the U.S. jets at 10 a.m., said Navy Capt. Scott Miller, a North American Aerospace Defense Command spokesman.
The bombers did not enter North American sovereign airspace, he said in a statement. Miller declined to say how close the bombers came to U.S. land. Fox News reported they flew as close as 55 miles off Alaska’s west coast.
Friday’s encounter was the first of its kind in just more than a year, Miller said. A similar incident occurred off Alaskan waters in April 2017 in what U.S. officials have described as routine if not tense encounters between adversarial aircraft where territorial lines meet.
The identification zone extends about 200 miles off the Alaskan coast and is mostly international airspace, Miller said, though Russian military activity will often prompt an in-kind response for U.S. warplanes. Intercepts in the zone occurred about 60 times from 2007 to 2017, the New York Times reported last year.
Miller said the Russian bombers, decades-old aircraft classified by NATO as the “Bear,” were flying in accordance with international norms. The aircraft are capable of carrying nuclear bombs, but it unclear what weapons they had on board, if any.
A Russian Defense Ministry statement released Friday diverged from the U.S. military account. They said the bombers were escorted by fighter jets and a reconnaissance jet that also acts as an anti-submarine platform.
Miller said that was not true.
“This was a safe intercept, which did not include a Russian recon plane, and no Russian fighters were present,” he told The Washington Post on Saturday.
It was not clear if the Russian air operation was an opportunity for real-world training or if it was in response to U.S. and NATO military operations elsewhere. Last week, Russia scrambled jets four times in response to foreign reconnaissance flights near its border, the Russian news service Interfax reported.
Aircraft intercepts, flybys and shadowings have escalated in recent years after Russian military activity and occupation in Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine beginning in 2014.
Earlier this month, a Russian Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jet flew within 20 feet of a U.S. P-8 surveillance aircraft over the Baltic Sea — a minuscule distance considering the aircraft move at hundreds of miles an hour — in an incident the U.S. military called safe but unprofessional.
Friday’s incident was relatively routine, but more aggressive maneuvers have worried defense officials and diplomats who said the encounters may eventually cause collisions or miscalculations that lead to a shoot-down.
A report issued in 2014 by the European Leadership Network, a London-based think tank, documented almost 40 incidents that together “add up to a highly disturbing picture of violations of national airspace, emergency scrambles, narrowly avoided midair collisions, close encounters at sea, simulated attack runs, and other dangerous actions happening on a regular basis over a very wide geographical area,” according to the report. The report was only compiled for 2014 and not for the subsequent years.
Image caption
A satellite image of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in North Korea
North Korea says it will begin dismantling its nuclear test site in less than two weeks in a ceremony attended by foreign journalists.
Pyongyang said it was taking “technical measures” to carry out the process between 23-25 May, North Korean state news agency KCNA reported on Saturday.
Scientists previously said the site may have partially collapsed in September.
The move is due to take place three weeks before US President Donald Trump meets North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
In April, South Korean officials said Mr Kim had stated he “would carry out the closing of the nuclear test site in May”, adding that nuclear experts from South Korea and the US would be invited to watch.
Their comments came after talks between Mr Kim and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in.
However there was no mention of allowing foreign experts access to the site in Saturday’s statement from North Korea.
The dismantling of the Punggye-ri site, the exact date of which will depend on weather conditions, will involve the collapsing of all tunnels using explosives and the removal of all observation facilities, research buildings and security posts.
Journalists from South Korea, China, the US, the UK and Russia will be asked to attend to witness the event.
North Korea said the intention was to allow “not only the local press but also journalists of other countries to conduct on-the-spot coverage in order to show in a transparent manner the dismantlement of the northern nuclear test ground”.
The reason officials gave for limiting the number of countries invited to send journalists was due to the “small space of the test ground… located in the uninhabited deep mountain area”.
What do we know about the test site?
Situated in mountainous terrain in the north-east, the Punggye-ri site is thought to be the North’s main nuclear facility.
Nuclear tests have taken place in a system of tunnels dug below Mount Mantap, near the Punggye-ri site.
Six nuclear tests have been carried out there since 2006.
Pyongyang’s professed commitment to “denuclearisation” is likely to differ from Washington’s demand for “comprehensive, verifiable and irreversible” nuclear disarmament.
On a recent visit to North Korea, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stressed that any such claim would require a “robust verification” programme by the US and other nations.
North Korea has also reneged on a number of promises made in previous years.
In 1994, then-US President Bill Clinton made plans to attack sites in North Korea based on intelligence that the state had begun shipping fuel rods that could be used to produce plutonium to its main nuclear facility, the Yongbyon complex.
The threat of US strikes at the time, along with an offer from the Clinton administration to help boost the state’s struggling economy, led to an agreement with the North Koreans.
The US provided fuel to an energy-starved economy, and North Korea agreed to freeze its programme. But Pyongyang later breached the agreement and the deal fell apart in 2002.
Confirmation of the meeting between the two men came after landmark talks between North and South Korea.
Mr Trump announced the date and place of the summit earlier this week, hours after he welcomed home three US detainees released from North Korea.
“We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!” he tweeted.
Is North Korea opening up?
There is a “sense of optimism” among North Korea’s leaders, the head of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said on Saturday after enjoying what he said was unprecedented access to the country.
David Beasley spent two days in the capital, Pyongyang, and two outside it, accompanied by government minders.
He said the country was working hard to meet nutritional standards, and hunger was not as high as in the 1990s.
Mr Beasley’s visit, from 8-11 May, included trips to WFP-funded projects – a children’s nursery in South Hwanghae province and a fortified biscuit factory in North North Pyongyan province.
“I didn’t see starvation like you had in the famine back in the 1990s, that’s the good news. But is there a hunger issue, is there under-nutrition? There’s no question about it,” he told the BBC.
“There is a sense of turning a new page in history,” he said.
