The United States Air Force’s tiltrotor aircraft Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey carried out a flight over Kyiv midday on Sept. 23, shortly after accomplishing a training mission together with Ukraine’s military.
The American convertiplanes of the 352nd Special Operations Wing purposefully crossed the city’s center along the Dnipro River banks at a low altitude.
Not long before that, the U.S. Embassy to Ukraine gave Kyivans a heads-up saying they could wave at the passing aircraft, and the country’s social media filled with numerous pictures and videos from the scene.
The Ospreys, which basically are a cross-breed of helicopters and airplanes, just hours before that successfully participated in a joint operation with Ukraine’s Special Operations and Air Force operators, during which they were refueled by a U.S. military aerial tanker Lockheed MC-130J.
“Such exercises were being carried out in the sky over south Ukraine and the Black Sea aquatic area,” as Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces command said on Sept. 23.
“Taking into account the unique properties of the Ospreys, this is the very universal transport capable of projecting troops to their mission’s location and, if necessary, to evacuate them.”
The maneuver took place as part of ongoing multinational military exercises Joint Endeavor-2020, which kick-started on Sept. 19, with the involvement of American, Ukrainian, and Canadian forces on the Ukrainian soil.
On Sept. 23, the exercises saw a massive aviation-related phase, during which as many as four U.S. Air Force’s strategic bombers Boeing B-52H Stratofortress carried out yet another flight across the Ukrainian airspace, escorted by Ukrainian jet fighters, towards Russian-occupied Crimea
Meanwhile, Russia is also conducting its massive military maneuvers in its Southern Military District and the Black Sea, where at least 80,000 troops are engaged.
