French soldiers scan the skies of Eastern Europe

The atmosphere is so cozy in this room of the “CAPCO” that it is almost disturbing. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the sky at the eastern borders of Europe has been watched, scrutinized from the bair base 942 of Lyon Mont-Verdun.

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Every day, more than a hundred military flights from NATO countries are displayed on the screens of the Air Center for Planning and Conduct of Operations (CAPCO). On one wall extends a screen almost 20 meters long and four high. We discover a map, that of eastern Europe, shared with NATO. And above, symbols, which represent what flies.

“There is a color code to identify everything that fliesslips Lieutenant-Colonel David, No. 2 in the center, who does not wish to say more. I can’t tell you more because the classification is secret“, he smiles. So understand that if it’s a green or blue dot, it’s rather “friend”, when the red or orange represents rather the opposite. But radars have their limits: what flies in the name of Russia above Ukraine cannot necessarily be seen, unlike anything flying under the NATO banner.

Since the beginning of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, the center has noted a change in the eastern sky with more than a hundred sorties per day since February 24. The day before the outbreak of war, Lieutenant Colonel Eric was there. “On February 23, it was NATO’s classic ‘air police’ missions, which are on alert on the ground, whether in Poland or in the Baltic countries. From the 24th, we put planes on alert in flight, along these borders with Ukraine and Belarus to monitor the approaches to NATO airspace. he details. AT also note that, until then, regularly, Russian military planes approached French and European airspace, since February 24, nothing.

The surveillance work of the Lyon Mont-Verdun base is not limited to Ukraine. In an underground room at the base, at the national air operations center headed by Colonel Sébastien, are displayed the 1,400 planes that fly over France every day.

At the moment, it is Russian civilian aircraft that are particularly scrutinized: “We look at everything, but by adding a few filters so as to be able to light up in order to be able to flash a device registered in Russia or a device likely to be chartered by a Russian legal or natural person“, says the colonel. Less than a dozen Russian civilian planes have tried to transit through France since the start of the war in Ukraine.