Spanish Eurofighter fighters and Italian F-35s were lifted from bases in Estonia and Lithuania to intercept Russian military aircraft over the Baltic Sea.
This is stated in the statement of the Joint Command of the NATO Air Forces.
Allied radars detected three unknown aircraft leaving Kaliningrad, and the NATO Joint Air Operations Center in Germany raised Allied fighters to intercept and identify them.
The NATO fighters of the air police mission in the Baltic States identified two Il-22PP electronic warfare aircraft and a Su-24 fighter.
At the same time, an Il-76 transport aircraft was detected, intercepted, and identified in the same area. The Russian aircraft had no flight plans and did not transmit transponder codes and, thus, posed a potential danger to civilian flights.
The air and sea routes in this region are overloaded with large volumes of civil traffic passing through this area, so that aircraft that do not comply with international flight safety regulations pose a potential danger to civil traffic.
“At the end of the mission, the fighters returned to their bases in Lithuania and Estonia. The Russian plane intercepted on Thursday did not enter the airspace of the Alliance, and the interception was carried out in the usual manner,” the command said.
