"Our state budgets do not allow us to form our own air force that would protect the airspace over the Baltics," Juris Dalbins, the chairman of the parliamentary committee for defense and internal affairs, told RIA Novosti after a meeting of parliamentarians from the three Baltic nations dedicated to the second anniversary of their accession to NATO. The former Soviet republics in the Baltics - Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia - joined the bloc on March 29, 2004.
Dalbins said that the Baltic states had a joint airspace monitoring network, Baltnet, which comprised national centers and the Baltics Control Center. The latter works in close cooperation with a similar NATO center.
He also said that the Baltic states did not have and would not have in the near future a fighter-interceptor capability, therefore, they had to rely on other NATO countries to protect their airspace.
The concern about national airspace protection flared up last year when a Russian Su-27 Flanker fighter flying from St. Petersburg to Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave within the European Union, crashed September 15 on Lithuanian territory after a navigation system failure.
The parliaments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania made today a joint appeal to their respective governments to draft a joint strategy on protecting their airspace.
