The government of Slovakia said on Friday that it would send 13 Soviet-designed fighter jets to Ukraine, a day after a similar announcement by Poland’s president, marking a possibly significant shift from NATO allies in increasing arms supplies for Kyiv. Slovakia, which borders both Ukraine and Poland, had said months ago that it was ready […]
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WARSAW — Poland’s president said on Thursday that his country would transfer four Soviet-designed MIG fighters to Ukraine “literally in the next few days,” potentially pushing Western military aid to the embattled country over a significant threshold. The warplanes would be the first sent to Ukraine by a NATO country since Russia invaded last year. […]
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WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s European Command on Thursday released the first declassified video images of the events leading up to a Russian fighter jet colliding with an unarmed U.S. reconnaissance drone on Tuesday, forcing the American aircraft down into the Black Sea. The dramatic 42-second color video clip shows two high-speed passes by two Su-27 […]
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WASHINGTON — A Russian warplane struck a U.S. surveillance drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday, hitting the drone’s propeller and causing its American operators to bring it down in international waters, according to the Pentagon, in the first known physical contact between the Russian and American militaries since the war in Ukraine started last […]
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CHANGWON, South Korea — A year after Russia invaded Ukraine, the war has spurred a global effort to produce more missiles, tanks, artillery shells and other munitions. And few countries have moved as quickly as South Korea to increase output. Last year, South Korea’s arms exports rose 140 percent to a record $17.3 billion, including […]
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On Feb. 7, Iran unveiled a new underground Air Force base called “Eagle 44” in a slick propaganda video. On the wall was a clue hiding in plain sight: a poster with silhouettes of fighter jets. One in particular stands out. It’s situated front and center, and is in the shape of a state-of-the-art military […]
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“The Chinese military has written about a range of potential applications for balloons and drones in near space,” he added. “You can intercept communications that you can’t capture from space. You can loiter for longer periods of time over targets, study or interfere with an adversary’s radar, target enemy satellites and help guide strategic weapons.” […]
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U.S. agencies are still investigating the origins of the three mysterious objects that U.S. fighter jets shot down between Friday and Sunday on the orders of Mr. Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada. Debris recovery efforts are underway at the sites in Alaska, the Yukon Territory in Canada and the Canadian side of […]
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The 2019 flight was not a one-off for Professor Wu and his team. The Eagles Men Aviation Science and Technology Group, or EMAST, a Beijing-based company that Professor Wu co-founded in 2004, has claimed a series of other successes for them. Advances in high-altitude balloons held out the potential for “high resolution, long-lasting, stable communications, […]
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LONDON — President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine pleaded with Britain on Wednesday to supply his country with fighter jets, making his dramatic appeal during a surprise visit to London that began a two-day diplomatic blitz of Ukraine’s Western allies. Expressing thanks for Britain’s robust and early military support, Mr. Zelensky nevertheless warned that warplanes were […]
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The echo from the episode, though, serves as a reminder that powerful countries regularly spy on one another, which generally becomes a problem when it goes public or leads to misunderstanding or tragedy. In 1983, a Soviet warplane shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 after it veered into Russian airspace at night, killing 269 […]
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Of course, there is nothing new about superpowers spying on one another, even from balloons. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized surveillance of the Soviet Union by lofting cameras on balloons in the mid-1950s, flying them “over Soviet bloc countries under the guise of meteorological research,” according to an article published by the National Archives in […]
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A Chinese balloon seen hovering over Montana this week has been described as an “intelligence-gathering” airship by the Pentagon and a stray civilian research airship by China. Whatever its intended use, the balloon offers a reminder of how for more than a century, governments have used balloons for surveillance and observation, most often during times […]
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