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U.S. and Russia Should Keep the Skies Open

U.S. and Russia Should Keep the Skies Open

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The Open Skies Treaty of 1992 isn’t a major arms-control agreement. But the Donald Trump administration’s reported intention to exit it is, in a way, a more troubling sign than its withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Treaty last year. If the U.S. abandons the pact, it and Russia will be blind to each other’s military deployments, giving paranoid generals a new reason to jump at shadows.

Open Skies was initiated by President George H.W. Bush when the Soviet Union still existed. He proposed that the U.S. and the Soviets, and their allies, be allowed to take 24-hour-notice surveillance flights over each other’s territory to photograph troops and military equipment. The idea, first proposed by President Dwight Eisenhower, was to make sure no clandestine military preparations were being made. The Soviets rejected it, and even though Russia signed the treaty under President Boris Yeltsin, it had enough misgivings about the agreement that it wasn’t ratified until 2001.

Today, though, Russia appears to be more enthusiastic about the pact than the U.S., despite the parties’ constant bickering about every aspect of their relationship, from overflight restrictions to camera filters and sensor specifications. And even though the U.S. has made more than twice as many surveillance flights over Russia as Russia has over the U.S., the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said it would be “sad” if the U.S. pulled out of the treaty.

One reason for that is, weirdly, a Russian technological advantage. Russia has invested in new planes and digital surveillance equipment. The U.S. has skimped on such investment. Last year, the House Armed Services Committee killed plans to replace two superannuated OC-135 aircraft used in the inspections, though then-Defense Secretary James Mattis complained that the U.S. could only complete two-thirds of planned missions because of the planes’ condition, while Russia makes 100% of scheduled flights.

As a result, Sergei Ryzhkov, an official responsible for treaty compliance control at the Russian Defense Ministry, recently wrote in Red Star, the ministry’s newspaper, that Russian surveillance technology used under the treaty was five to six years ahead of that used by the U.S.

Wait a minute, though — doesn’t satellite photography, even the unclassified, commercial kind, provide surveillance capabilities on par with plane overflights using the most cutting-edge equipment? Can’t the U.S., and, for that matter, Russia see every square inch of each other’s territory from space? 

The answer is “mostly but not quite.” Ryzkov wrote that between November and March, the area around Moscow, for example, has too much cloud cover for satellite photos to be useful, while an Open Skies surveillance plane can fly below the clouds, just 1,000 meters above ground. Besides, planes “enjoy much more flexibility in choosing flight paths,” as arms control experts Alexandra Bell and Anthony Weir wrote in a recent article defending the treaty. They continued: “The three to four days’ warning that observed countries get before a satellite overpass gives them ample time to move military assets. Treaty flights provide only 24 hours’ notice, increasing the odds that overflights capture an accurate assessment. Planes can also double back to provide a more comprehensive set of images than fixed-orbit satellites can.”

It would be downright stupid for the U.S. to miss a military buildup on Russia’s western border because of bad weather. That’s one reason Ukraine has asked the U.S. not to withdraw from the treaty.

Yet, instead of matching Russia’s surveillance technology advances, last year Congress legislated, and Trump signed, a suspension of funding the treaty until it was determined that Russia was fully compliant.

The U.S. compliance concerns have to do with Russia’s refusal to allow American flights over parts of its territory bordering on the disputed territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and restrictions on flying for more than 500 kilometers (310 miles) over Russia’s European enclave of Kaliningrad. The treaty bans flights within 10 kilometers from the borders of countries that aren’t parties to it; after its 2008 conflict with Georgia, Russia has recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent countries, and so it insists on applying this ban to them. To the U.S., and to most of the world, they are part of Georgia, and Washington must insist that the 10 kilometer ban is irrelevant. This is a dispute of principle — but it’s not clear why it should prevent Russia and the U.S. from checking on what their militaries are doing on vast swathes of other territory.

In the case of Kaliningrad, Russia insists the restriction is meant to keep surveillance planes from zigzagging back and forth and disrupting civilian flights — not much of an excuse but not really a deal-breaker. Besides, the U.S. has responded by not letting Russia fly over certain militarily important areas of Alaska and Hawaii. That’s adequate retaliation that hasn’t, however, led Russia to renounce the treaty.

There is a lot of mistrust between the U.S. and Russian military and intelligence communities, and mutual recriminations about Open Skies are inevitable. But the mere continued existence of the treaty shows that the parties are still sometimes capable of suspending the mistrust. It’s a rare aspect of the current U.S.-Russian relationship that makes it better than the Cold War-era confrontation.

“Show me yours and I’ll show you mine” is an important principle in an adversarial relationship. It means more than any promise not to develop certain weapons. A deal like the INF treaty can be overtaken by technological and geopolitical developments, but openness never goes out of date. That’s the main reason the U.S. and Russia must keep Open Skies alive, even if it’s only a relic of better times. 

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

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