On Monday, the Lithuanian Defense Ministry reported that NATO fighter jets on air policing duty had taken off last week to identify two separate Russian aircraft flying in international airspace between Kaliningrad and mainland Russia.
The allied jets were scrambled to identify Russian warplanes that had veered into the neutral airspace without reported flight plans and without their transponders activated – against flight rules in an already tense environment in the region after one of Russia’s hypersonic missiles was deployed to western Ukraine, raising the ire of the international community.
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In the first instance, last Monday, a NATO jet was launched to identify a Sukhoi-30 multirole fighter en route from Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania, to mainland Russia.
In the second instance, the ministry said, NATO air policing fighters were scrambled to identify a Russian Antonov-26 transport aircraft flying in the opposite direction, again without a flight plan or radar transponders.
Poland and the Baltics have been on high alert ever since a Belarus-based Oreshnik hit civilian targets in Lviv last week, sparking an emergency meeting in the UN on Monday, focused on Russia’s recent attacks on energy targets in Ukraine that have left hundreds of thousands without power in sub-freezing temperatures.
Bloomberg on Monday reported that, amid such tensions in northeast Europe, NATO has asked Turkey to contribute American-made F-16 fighters to the Baltic policing mission several months ahead of schedule.
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Turkey’s turn at the four-month rotation of NATO jets operating out of Estonia to patrol exactly this type of Russian aviation activity was set to begin in August.