Lithuania 2016, NATO Air policing mission base. Norwegian officer in front of his fighter jet. NATO has several bases throughout the Baltic states. Each day the fighter planes of air forces of Nowegian, Italian and German, French and more states had to check for russian planes coming in from St.Petersburg to KaLiningrad with their transponders turned off. The amount of unofficials flights like this is raising constantly officials said You can search on YT for videos of NATO pilots checking out these planes.
In 2016 I went with my big love and expert reporter Prune Antoine #plumaberlin and Gil Skorwid on a research trip about the remilitarisation of the Kaliningrad region for #Mediapart and later won the #prixchaffajon for multimedia Poland built surveillance towers along the whole border of Kaliningrad and has military units stationed near the border. Lithuania just introduced conscription under President Dalia Grybauskaitė.
The film maker Aleksandras Matonis restaged the battle of Kalniske between the NKDW forces and Lithuanian partisans after WW2 to reshape Lithuanian fighting spirit because history books said Lithuanian lost drastically which he thought to be a Russian myth. The US Army had a training center for the Lithuanian army and the NATO has their quick response air force stationed in the Baltic states. They reported daily flights from russian mainland to Kaliningrad without transponder so they had to scramble their fighters to check every flight. But nobody knew what’s inside Kaliningrad. And this enclave is in missile range of a lot of the mayor cities of Europe.
It has been 6 years now and all of a sudden all the fears become real in #Ukraine. Its horrible and i hope its over soon and Russian forces are withdrawing from Ukrainian soil.
