This Is The Armada Of Spy Planes Tracking Russia's Forces Surrounding Ukraine

Meet the fleet of intel-gathering planes that has been aloft over the Black Sea and Ukraine to keep tabs on Russian forces.

BY THOMAS NEWDICK FEBRUARY 18, 2022
THE WAR ZONE

The security situation in the last few weeks has been unprecedented for post-Cold War Europe, with a continued Russian military build-up around Ukraine’s borders fueling fears of an imminent new invasion, while tensions elsewhere in the region have been met with significant military movements by East and West, around the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, in particular. What’s also been unusual about this situation has been the willingness of the United States and other NATO members and allies to share at least some of their intelligence concerning developments on the Russian side, likely with the aim of removing the Kremlin’s options to launch a surprise attack or some kind of false-flag operation directed against Ukraine.

Much of that intelligence, and a lot more besides, is being gathered on a daily basis by a diverse fleet of aircraft that are operating around these hotspots as well as directly over Ukraine and along the borders of Russia and its close ally Belarus. At the same time, this dynamic reinforces the continued importance of aircraft — manned and unmanned — thanks to their ability to provide the kind of persistent monitoring demanded by the kind of fluid situation that exists on the ground. While satellite imagery has already played an important role in understanding the scale of the Russian build-up, aircraft clearly still offer key advantages.

A U.S. Air Force U-2S rests in a hangar at RAF Fairford, England. Assigned to the 9th Reconnaissance Wing, Beale Air Force Base, California, these aircraft regularly deploy to Fairford as part of the 99th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron.

With the Kremlin still building up its forces in and around Ukraine, deploying now between 169,000 and 190,000 personnel, according to the U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), and despite claims of a partial Russian drawdown, these intelligence-gathering aircraft are as busy as ever. Indeed, it’s certain that air assets played a significant part in preparing this latest assessment, which represents a significant increase over the roughly 100,000 Russian troops in and around Ukraine as of January 30. According to Western estimates, the current situation includes 110 Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs), the country’s primary ground combat formations, now around Ukraine, equivalent to around two-thirds of all those available to Russia.

E-8C Joint STARS
The U.S. Air Force’s E-8C is a battlefield management command-and-control aircraft that provides synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) imaging — taking image-like radar maps of the ground environment at standoff ranges — and ground-moving-target-indicator (GMTI) functions. This makes it especially useful for tracking the movement of vehicles — including heavy armor, artillery, and even long-range missiles, as well as air-defense systems — of which there has been an influx into areas close to Ukraine’s borders in the last few months.

Flying with joint Air Force and Army crews, the E-8C’s capabilities make it an ideal asset to monitor the disposition of Russian forces close to the Ukrainian border, to get a better idea of Moscow’s intentions and capabilities. Because radar is not impacted by cloud cover, the E-8C can collect intelligence regardless of the weather conditions, day or night.

Much, but by no means all of the aerial intel-gathering activities can be tracked in real-time using publicly available flight-tracking software and a growing cadre of open-source intelligence collectors who devote much time to making sense of these aircraft movements. These include Amelia Smith, or @ameliairheart, whose maps with overlaid flight paths and estimated sensor ranges appear in this article.

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https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44337/these-are-the-planes-keeping-watch-on-russian-forces-around-ukraine