A study has claimed that dangerous military incidents involving Russia and the West have occurred with greater frequency since the outbreak of the Ukraine conflict. Some of them could have caused deaths - or conflict, reports GHN based on DW.
The number of potentially dangerous military incidents involving Russia and the West has grown since the Ukraine crisis erupted early this year, a report by London-based think-tank European Leadership Network (ELN) said on Monday.
The report, entitled "Dangerous Brinkmanship - Close Military Enconcounters Between Russia and the West in 2014," listed a total of 45 incidents so far this year, including three classed as "high risk" and 11 others that were "serious incidents with escalation risk."
Among the most dangerous incidents listed was a near collision in early March between a Scandinavian airliner carrying 132 passengers and a Russian warplane that was flying covertly.
Swedish media reported that the two planes missed one another in the air by just 90 meters (300 feet), some 80 kilometers southeast of the Swedish city of Malmö. The Scandinavian Airlines Boeing 737 was flying from Copenhagen to Rome.
"A collision was apparently avoided thanks only to good visibiity and the alertness of the passenger plane pilots," the ELN report said, adding that the Russian reconnaissance plane had not transmitted its position.
The two other "high-risk" incidents were the alleged abduction of an Estonian security service operative by Russian agents from an Estonian border post on September 5, and the reports of "foreign underwater activity" off the Swedish coast last month, which triggered a large-scale maritime operation by Sweden.