The cost a photo flight can see
Forsvaret wrote that one of the Air Force’s Fennec helicopters was fired at with two flares on 14 September while taking routine photographs of a Russian frigate in international waters off Gedser. One flare passed close to the aircraft. The note is stamped 23.02. The frigate is unnamed; Forsvaret added no further comment. The Fennec flight is force posture: a monitoring aircraft.[1]
In the same window Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said NATO fighter jets destroyed a drone that entered Lithuanian airspace. The national crisis centre said the drone may have come from Belarus near Kaunas and that its origin has not yet been determined. The defence ministry said Italian pilots took part in the response. That intercept is air defense against drones.[2]
Two employments on the same flank
The flares fired at the Fennec off Gedser and the object destroyed in Lithuanian airspace show how a monitoring flight and national airspace are filled. Flares may be signaling; the object over Lithuania may be a stray. The two events do not prove one chain of command. Deterrence still tracks the weapons actually employed.[1], [2]
At Svalbard, allied hulls already at sea while the rehearsal ran marked the gap between an announced red line and a defended one; what stopped was the rehearsal. The flares off Gedser price that line as the employment of a photo flight. If another monitoring flight off Gedser is met with flares or an intercept, the escalation ladder shows its next rung.[1], [3]