Observation aircraft from Ukraine in U.S. under Open Skies provisions
by R.L. Chomiak
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly
WASHINGTON - Ukraine can. Ukraine has just shown it can do everything the "big powers" can, when it comes to inspecting each other's territory for treaty violations, and the U.S. applauded.
On the flight line of Washington's Dulles Airport April 23 it was open house for two aircraft: a converted Boeing 707 with four jet engines, U.S. Air Force markings and the capability to stay aloft for 40 hours and refuel in mid-air; and a Kyiv-designed AN-30, two-engine turboprop, the size of a plane flown by a respectable American feeder airline, and which can stay up in the air for six hours before refueling on the ground.
But the Antonov named "Blakytna Stezha" (Azure Observation Squad) with a gold trident on its tail, had flown over 13 of the midwestern and southern American states, including Ohio, Oklahoma, Georgia and Florida, and photographed what it wanted.
At a press conference April 23, Brig. Gen. Thomas Kuenning of the U.S. Air Force, director of the On-Site Inspection Agency (OSIA), applauded the Ukrainians and expressed admiration for their achievement. His Ukrainian counterpart, Gen.-Maj. Mykola Honcharenko, chief of the Verification Center of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, was proud of his 21-member observer team.
Gen. Honcharenko said he was "moved by the warm reception his team received from the American side." He also expressed appreciation to the U.S. for its assistance in enabling Ukraine to be the first country of the former Warsaw Pact to make this historic mission under the Open Skies Treaty.
(The important assistance included provisions for refueling stops at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Robins AFB in Georgia and Tinker AFB in Oklahoma because of the short, 1,500-mile range of the Antonov aircraft. It took the Ukrainians four days to fly from Kyiv to Washington, with stops in Germany, England, Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, Canada and the state of Maine.)
But the main purpose of the mission was to show all 27 countries that have signed the Open Skies Treaty, and others that would join it in the future, that the treaty offers a level playing field for superpowers and other countries when it comes to observing each other's territory for openness, transparency and confidence-building, explained Gen. Kuenning. And to convince the parliaments of signatory countries, to ratify the treaty (if they haven't yet done so).
Key countries in this category are Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, said the American general. The Verkhovna Rada is expected to vote on treaty ratification in June. He added, "We're happy to give the Ukrainian military and government support to ratify the treaty."
Military and diplomatic representatives of other countries had an opportunity to go over the results of the mission after its completion with the Ukrainians and Americans before the Ukrainian observers' return flight to Kyiv.
"This [mission] was an unprecedented event, both in the technical and political sense," said Ukraine's obviously proud Ambassador Yuri Shcherbak, after he greeted each of the 21 Ukrainian observers as they lined up for review beside their aircraft. Dr. Shcherbak also toured both the American and Ukrainian observer planes.
"It shows that our armed forces have great potential," he told reporters, and added with a smile that the 6,000-mile flight to Washington by the AN-30 deserves to be considered by the Guinness Book of World Records. On a serious note, he went on to say that the short range of the Ukrainian observer plane is quite adequate for Ukraine's needs: observing what is happening in countries on the European continent.
"This [mission] was done so that other countries and we wouldn't fear each other. We open our sky and others open their sky to us." Confidence measures, with their elements of transparency and openness "are pages being added to the chronicle of peaceful relations between nations," Ambassador Shcherbak noted.
Gen. Honcharenko recalled that it was President Dwight Eisenhower who first proposed the Open Skies Treaty in 1955, but the Soviet Union rejected it. "In 1989 President [George] Bush proposed it again as an agreement between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The treaty was signed in 1992 ... as a measure to reduce tension. In 1994 the United States made the first observer flight over Ukraine and in October 1996 the second one. Our mission is the return visit of the OC135 flight of last October."
As a treaty negotiated primarily by two superpowers, Open Skies is full of fine-print limitations, such as procedures for opening the camera bays from outside an observer plane so that photographing is done only after an observation flight plan is accepted by both sides (but within 24 hours), and a provision that cameras have enough resolution to tell a truck from a tank. U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Dennis Connaughton of the On-Sight Inspection Agency, said, it's "off-the-shelf hardware, available to any signatory country" - not the type of equipment that can read a license plate on a car. But he also said that under the treaty, if the Ukrainians wanted to photograph the Chicago area, the OSIA within 24 hours would have to clear the airspace above O'Hare, the busiest airport in the world, for their flight.
The purpose of the mission, Col. Connaughton said, was "to show the Rada [Ukrainian Parliament], that you can do it," so that it would vote to ratify the treaty.
Maj. Yurii Andrienko, one of the Ukrainian observers, said he is proud of his country's Antonov-30. He flew in one in Afghanistan, he explained, where it was used between 1981 and 1989, and he had a friend who piloted one and was shot down over Afghanistan. The plane also flew in Angola, he said, adding that "there is evidence that it was used in Chechnya."
Col. Fedir Tsymbaliuk said the Blakytna Stezha has already done reciprocal missions with Germany, the United Kingdom, Romania and Slovakia. The U.S. mission, he said, was 70 percent successful, but that wasn't because of American restrictions: on the last leg of the overflight clouds got in the way.
Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 4, 1997, No. 18, Vol. LXV
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