The US military appears to be stepping up aerial surveillance of a Russian territory in Europe, potentially signalling concern that the Kremlin could decide to deploy or even use nuclear weapons in Ukraine as Russian leaders have warned.

On Wednesday, a US electronic surveillance plane, the Boeing RC-135, departed from a base in the United Kingdom and circled around Kaliningrad, a Russian territory along the Baltic Sea — sharing no land border with the mainland — that was annexed after World War II, according to a flight tracking website. It was at least the third such flight in the past week.

Home to nearly 500,000 people, it is sometimes referred to as Russia’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” because it is wedged between Poland and Lithuania, essentially providing the Kremlin a forward operating base within NATO territory.

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In 2018, Russia carried out a “major renovation” of an active nuclear weapons storage facility in Kaliningrad some 50 kilometers from Poland, according to Hans Kristensen, a nuclear arms expert at the Federation of American Scientists. The facility, he wrote at the time, could function “as a forward storage site that would be supplied with warheads from central storage sites in a crisis”.

Read more: yahoo