A French Mirage 2000 fighter plane intercepted a Russian intelligence aircraft off the Estonian coast, the General Staff of the Armed Forces announced on Tuesday.
“Taking off on alert and interception of a Russian Il-20 “Coot” reconnaissance and intelligence aircraft off the Estonian coast by French Mirage 2000-5s
,” the General Staff wrote on X on February 27.
“Objective: protect the airspace of our Baltic allies.”
To discover
Follow information on the war in Ukraine with the Figaro application
French military aircraft are deployed in the Baltic States as part of a NATO mission called
“sky police”
.
Last November, France announced the deployment of four Mirage 2000-5* in Lithuania.
Their role is to
“preserve the security of Alliance airspace”
, indicates NATO on its website.
Already in May 2023, Russia indicated that it had taken off one of its warplanes to meet two military aircraft, one French and the other German, over the Baltic Sea.
She accused them of wanting to
“violate the
Russian border”.
“Foreign military planes have turned around from Russia’s state border
,” the Russian Defense Ministry said on Telegram.
The interception of a Russian intelligence apparatus occurs this time in a context of tensions, after a statement by Emmanuel Macron on the sidelines of a meeting of Ukraine's European allies in Paris.
The French president did not rule out sending Western troops to Ukraine to support kyiv's troops in the face of the Russian invasion.
The Kremlin spokesperson warned that sending troops to Ukraine would
“not be in the interests”
of the West.
Asked about the risk of a direct conflict between NATO and Russia in the event of a military presence in Ukraine, Dmitry Peskov replied that
“in this case we should not talk about probability, but about inevitability”
.
*The Mirage 2000 planes are designed by the Dassault group, owner of Le Figaro