NATO intercepted Russian strategic bombers and fighter jets that flew over the Baltic Sea in April 2026, a muscular display of air power on the alliance’s eastern flank away from the spotlight on the Middle East.
French Rafale fighters were deployed on April 20 from a Lithuanian air base where they are stationed as part of a decades-long NATO air-policing effort. The fighters armed with air-to-air missiles joined jets from Denmark, Finland, Poland, Romania and Sweden. They all took to the skies to inspect and keep watch on the Russian flight, the French detachment said.
The Russian mission included two supersonic Tu-22M3s, as well as about 10 fighters — Su-30s and Su-35s — that took turns escorting the larger strategic bombers, according to the statement.
NATO routinely scrambles fighter aircraft to intercept Russian warplanes that approach or fly near the alliance’s airspace. NATO says the Russian planes it intercepts often fail to use their transponders and don’t communicate with air traffic controllers or file a flight plan. NATO jets are sent to identify them.
Many of the Russian flights that NATO monitors with its Baltic air policing mission, in place since Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia joined the alliance in 2004, are to and from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Even before the war in Ukraine, NATO was intercepting Russian planes about 300 times each year, mostly over waters around northern Europe.
A journalist from The Associated Press witnessed the French detachment’s response from the sprawling Šiauliai Air Base in Lithuania. NATO uses the base for fighter patrols that police the skies on the alliance’s eastern flank.
Two French Rafale fighter jets’ two-man crews — a pilot and a navigator — were seen racing in two vans to the planes’ hangars from the headquarters building the French detachment uses during its four-month deployment on the air base. The crews were already suited up because they’d been on standby, so they would be ready to take to the air within minutes.
The two crews quickly took their places in their planes’ cockpits. They were then put on hold, with the planes’ jet engines ignited, until they got the order to take off. Then they taxied out of their hangars and roared off into the clear skies.
The April 20 flight was the latest in Russia’s maneuvers over the Baltic Sea. Lithuania’s defense ministry said NATO jets were scrambled four times from April 13-19 to intercept Russian aircraft that violated flight rules that included turning off flight transponders and flying without a flight plan.