The RAF has commenced air defence missions over Poland in response to Vladimir Putin’s drone attacks on the country and I was lucky enough to be invited along. Defence Secretary John Healey announced that the UK would bolster Nato’s eastern flank in response “Russia’s reckless behaviour” earlier this week, with RAF Typhoons flying their first air defence sortie on Friday night.
The mission came just hours after it was announced that Russian jets had been intercepted in Estonia’s airspace, a move which heightened the importance of the task ahead. I arrived at RAF Brize Norton on Friday afternoon as I did many times throughout my previous career – but this time it felt different. That feeling didn’t come because I was no longer in military uniform or the knowledge that I would be taking off and landing from the same place.
It felt different because on each occasion I transited through the airbase, I never felt that I was deploying to a place of significant danger, or if I’m being honest, doing something with such grave geo-political implications, owing to a lack of operational deployments across the British Army during my eight years of service.
This time felt different because the mission I was taggling along on was ordered at the highest level of government in direct response to the actions of the Russian dictator and it would no doubt be monitored from within the Kremlin.
The RAF Voyager that I would be on would be refuelling jets in mid-air who would then be flying off to have a real strategic effect on the border of the greatest military alliance the world had ever seen.
Armed with missiles, their mission was “to patrol Polish skies and deter and defend against aerial threats from Russia, including drones,” meaning they could well be tasked with intercepting anything launched from Russia.
Even if that was an unlikely prospect, witnessing the UK’s response to Putin in the midst of increasing global tensions felt significant.
Throughout the flight I had the opportunity to talk with the crew, conversations that for operational reasons cannot be reported.
But the tone of those conversations left me surprised if not shocked. Sat in a cockpit less than 100 miles from Russian territory, one might think that the gravity of the situation and the realistic prospect of armed conflict with a peer enemy might be weighing upon them – but if anything, the opposite was true.
As a soldier whose career was spent in the post-Afghanistan era, serious operational deployments were few and far between, but of course for the RAF, missions over places such as Iraq, Syria, Africa and Israel have been an enduring reality; as has defence of Nato’s eastern border which is routinely monitored on a rotational basis by the alliance’s members.
To them, a mission is a mission, and they are determined to do it to the best of their ability.
Whilst the rhetoric of politicians, the media and the general public at large can be hyperbolic and sensationalist, in the cockpit of the RAF Voyager dispensing 27.4 tonnes of fuel to 14 fighter jets, the mood was cool, calm and collected.
Whilst much of what I saw is unable to be reported, I disembarked in the early hours of Saturday morning in the full confidence that whatever Putin might try next to provoke and test the Nato alliance, the border was a safer place for the presence of the outstanding men and women who serve in our nation’s air force.
