A Spanish Eurofighter fighter (on the left), next to a Bulgarian Air Force MiG-29, at the Graf Ignatievo base (Bulgaria), last February. Valentina Petrova (AP)
The Spanish fighters will once again patrol the Black Sea in the midst of the Ukraine war and, for the first time, two detachments with a total of 16 aircraft will do so simultaneously.
Eight Eurofighter fighters will be deployed in Bulgaria on November 1 on an enhanced air policing (EAP) mission, alongside the local Air Force, until December 23, the eve of Christmas Eve, the Bulgarian minister announced. Defense, Dimitar Stoyanov, and has confirmed the Spanish ministry.
This will not be the only detachment of the Air Force to be deployed in the Balkans before the end of the year.
At the beginning of December, another eight Spanish Eurofighters will go to Romania, within the framework of NATO's plans to reinforce the defense of the allies closest to Russia.
In this case, the mission will be longer and will last for four months, until March 2023, so both will coincide in December for several weeks.
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Spanish pilots already have experience in monitoring the airspace of these two NATO countries against incursions by Russian aircraft.
In February 2021, a detachment made up of six Eurofighters and 130 soldiers from the 11th Wing of the Air Force, based in Morón de la Frontera (Seville), operated for two months from the Mihail Kogalniceanu base, near the Romanian city of Constance, making more than 400 flights.
In February of this year, another detachment made up of four Eurofighters and 130 soldiers from Wing 14 (Albacete) was deployed for the same purpose, from February 11 to March 31, at the Graf Ignatievo Bulgarian base, coinciding with the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This will be, however, the first time that the Spanish fighters are deployed simultaneously in the two countries bordering the Black Sea.
NATO's southern flank air defense is directed from the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) at the base in Torrejón de Ardoz (Madrid).
NATO launched this mission in 2014, after the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula by Russia, with the aim of dissuading this country from any aggression or threat to the members of the Atlantic Alliance.
The fighters' mission is to intercept Russian planes that approach allied airspace without identifying themselves or declaring a flight plan.
Since 2006, Spanish fighters have participated on numerous occasions in the NATO air policing operation in the Baltic republics, but until 2020 they had never done so in the Black Sea.
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