After China and Russia flew strategic bombers near Alaska airspace this week, lawmakers in Congress began expressing new concerns that the military exercises were a stark escalation in the standoff between the adversary countries and the United States.
“This is a bomber task force … they’ve never done that,” Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska told NOTUS. He said the military exercises were “provocative” and “an escalation” toward the U.S.
He showed NOTUS a picture of a Chinese aircraft that flew close to Alaska airspace, and he noted the danger that those aircraft presented. “That’s a nuclear bomber,” he said.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command reported that two Russian Tu-95 bombers and two Chinese H-6 bombers were escorted by Russian fighter jets over the Bering Sea on Wednesday, coming close enough to Alaska airspace that the U.S. military and Canada scrambled fighter jets.
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In a post on X, Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska called the patrol “unprovoked aggression by Russia and China.”
“Alaska is at the front lines of America’s national security in the Arctic and the Indo-Pacific,” she said.
Sen. Ben Cardin, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he hadn’t read the reports about the military exercise but said the situation was concerning.“I think there is a dangerous trend,” Cardin told NOTUS. “Their relationship was primarily transactional, one-off in the past, and there now seems to be more coordinated activities.”
Alaska’s senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, told NOTUS that it wasn’t exactly “new news” to Russians training near Alaska. The military sees the Russians doing exercises in the area “often enough.”
“In fact, too often,” she said. “But to see the Chinese with the Russians was unprecedented,” though she also noted the patrol didn’t cross over into U.S. airspace and didn’t do anything that was “threatening.”
Still, Murkowski said the exercise represented a larger concern — one that she was thankful the U.S. and Canada were prepared for.
“What we saw, and I think what the Russians and the Chinese saw, was an exceptional response from the U.S. and Canada on this,” she said.
But again, Alaska’s junior senator emphasized the unprecedented nature of the joint exercises.
“The fact that they’re doing joint bomber missions, that’s never happened before,” Sullivan said. “We need to be on it, and [on Wednesday] we were on it in a good way.”
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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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