NATO jets have intercepted Russian navy planes in worldwide airspace, persevering with a long-established sample of behaviour by the Kremlin that has taken on new significance because the invasion of Ukraine.
The Norwegian air power says it scrambled two F-35 fighters to reply to the sighting of a number of Russian planes off the northern area of Finnmark.
According to the air power, the group “consisted of two strategic bombers of the kind Blackjack (Tu-160), adopted by two tankers of the kind Midas (Il-78), in addition to three Foxhound fighter jets (MiG-31)”.
After Norway shared particulars of the incident, Russia’s ministry of defence issued a press release describing a “planned flight” of 14 hours throughout which “long-range aircraft crews carried out night and day refuelling in the air”. It didn’t give a purpose for the train, merely saying that its pilots “regularly fly over the neutral waters of the Arctic, the North Atlantic, the Black and Baltic Seas, and the Pacific Ocean”.
The Finnmark incident echoes one other that occurred in early March, when two Norwegian F-35s intercepted two Ilyushin IL-38 reconnaissance planes in the identical space.
Meanwhile, Eurofighter jets belonging to Germany and Britain intercepted three Russian navy aircraft flying over worldwide waters within the Baltic Sea on Tuesday, all with their transponders switched off.
The Luftwaffe shared footage of two SU-27 fighters and an IL-20 reconnaissance aircraft – one of many longest-serving and most secretive intelligence-gathering craft within the Russian navy arsenal.
Russian and NATO navy aircraft routinely intercepted one another in worldwide airspace a whole bunch of instances a yr prior to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022; in the middle of the final twenty years, Britain’s Royal Air Force alone has been scrambled to reply to Russian navy flights on properly over 100 events.
Encounters between aircraft have continued amid the heightened tensions ensuing from the Ukrainian conflict, however apart from an incident through which two Russian fighters downed an American drone over the Black Sea, none have as but resulted in bodily encounters.
