Georgia and Russia, together with a team from UK, carried out two joint surveillance flights on each others territories last month, it emerged on October 8 after UK Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, called the mission “a success”.
The observation flights were carried out in frames of the Treaty on Open Skies, the document which entered into force in 2002 and which is a military treaty unrelated to commercial Open Skies arrangement.
It establishes a regime of unarmed aerial observation flights over the entire territory of its 34 participants, also including Georgia and Russia. The treaty aims at enhancing mutual understanding and confidence by giving its participants a direct role in gathering information about military forces and activities of concern to them.
“These flights showed that progress can be made on arms control treaties even amidst the most trying circumstances. It is testament to the professionalism not just of British forces, but of their Georgian and Russian counterparts, that the missions went so smoothly,” Foreign Secretary Miliband wrote on the Foreign Office blog on October 8.
The first observation flight took off from Moscow in early September with teams from Georgia, Russia and UK on board of a Swedish military aircraft, hired for this purpose, according to the British embassy in Tbilisi.
And the second observation flight, with teams from the three countries onboard, was conducted in Georgia on September 30. An aircraft hired from Ukraine was used for the observation flight over Georgia.
The UK Foreign Secretary said that to make progress in stabilizing situation in the region “we also need to build confidence between the parties.”
“That is why I applaud the success of a package of joint Russia-UK-Georgia over-flight missions,” he added.
The Georgian Defense Ministry’s comment on the matter was not immediately available at the time of writing.
This post is also available in: ქართული (Georgian)