American F-22 Raptor Leading Polish F-16s Is What NATO Air Shielding Looks Like

Then Russia invaded Ukraine and ignited the biggest war between near-peer, advanced nations since the Second World War. It all began on February 24, 2022, when a conflict that officially started with the Russian annexation of Ukrainian Crimea in 2014 entered an active, all-out war phase.

Unlike many other conflicts that came and went around the world since WWII ended, this one is a lot more dangerous on multiple levels, but mostly because it's about a nuclear-armed enemy pushing against a nation more than capable of defending itself.

As soon as the war started, the Western world came together behind Ukraine and stopped at nothing when it came to sending help, short of getting directly involved. Somehow, the conflict remained contained within Ukrainian (and sometimes Russian) borders, but that doesn’t mean Ukraine’s neighbors, which also happen to be NATO members, don’t get ready for a worst-case scenario.

To prevent an expansion of the war in the region, and to deter potential Russian plans to provoke a confrontation with NATO, allies began several months ago “an increased air and missile defense posture along the Alliance’s eastern flank,” meaning the countries of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

The new posture is called Air Shielding and has allied fighter jets and ground-based air and missile defense systems deployed in the region to defend against potential attacks. Military units are rotated for weeks or months at locations in these countries.

Most of the time, these troop movements and air patrols take place behind closed doors, or at such remote locations and distances we civilians don’t get to properly experience them. So whenever one of the parties involved gives us a glimpse of what Air Shielding is about, we’re bound to notice.

The U.S. Air Force (USAF), which is actively involved in NATO’s Air Shielding missions, is among the last to do so this year, as they released an image showing three allied fighter jets over the Polish Lask Air Base.

The image, going straight into our Photo of the Day coverage for obvious reasons, was snapped back in October, when the American 90th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron took its F-22 Raptors to the said base for joint flights with Polish F-16s as part of something called the NATO Air Shielding media day. They were joined by Italian Eurofighter Typhoons, but they are not visible in the USAF pic, nor in the video attached below.

No matter how much we like seeing military aircraft in the sky, we’d rather have them up there for testing and training, not actual war-making, so here’s to hoping the next time we’ll get to talk about American and European planes flying together things will be a lot calmer over there.