U.S. Testing Our Border, Paper Says

A Russian newspaper suggested on Thursday that a U.S. cargo plane that violated Russian airspace earlier this week deliberately did so to test the country's air defenses.The Segodnya newspaper said the C-130 Hercules might have been carrying information-gathering equipment when forced to land at the southern airport of Adler on Tuesday when on a flight from Frankfurt to the Georgian capital Tbilisi. The Hercules was an official U.S. plane on a diplomatic mission to Tbilisi. In April, Russian fighter planes forced an Israeli private aircraft to land at Adler after it violated Russian airspace on a flight from Tbilisi to Tel Aviv."Some experts doubt that such frequent incidents at one and the same place are fortuitous. It is more likely they are deliberate breaches of the established rules," designed "to activate the area's air defense system," Segodnya said.The U.S. State Department did not comment on the paper's allegations.The effectiveness of the Russian air defense forces has been put in question by the loss of forward tracking stations in Ukraine and the former Soviet Transcaucasian republics. "Given the breakup of the Soviet air defense system, Russia had to set up new air defense boundaries, in particular in the Caucasus, which have been studied by U.S. and NATO reconnaissance centers in Turkey," Segodnya said. Colonel General of the Air Force, Viktor Prudnikov, told the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda that the latest incidents "show that no one takes the trouble to notify the authorities, and this spontaneous invasion of Russia's air space is going on.""There are those who have the impression that the former Soviet Union has broken up into independent states, which are not yet quite ready to properly control their air space," he said."So that no one should get the itch to probe our air borders or to run wild in the air, I must say that we have to dispel such views with actions," he said. Reuters, MT