US jets intercept Russian bombers

Two Russian long-range bombers were intercepted off the coast of Alaska by a pair of F-22 Raptor fighter jets on Friday, the military said.

The Tu-95 bombers were flying in the Air Defense Identification Zone in the Bering Sea north of the Aleutian Islands, where they were visually identified and shadowed by the U.S. jets at 10 a.m., said Navy Capt. Scott Miller, a North American Aerospace Defense Command spokesman.

The bombers did not enter North American sovereign airspace, he said in a statement. Miller declined to say how close the bombers came to U.S. land. Fox News reported they flew as close as 55 miles off Alaska’s west coast.

Friday’s encounter was the first of its kind in just more than a year, Miller said. A similar incident occurred off Alaskan waters in April 2017 in what U.S. officials have described as routine if not tense encounters between adversarial aircraft where territorial lines meet.

The identification zone extends about 200 miles off the Alaskan coast and is mostly international airspace, Miller said, though Russian military activity will often prompt an inkind response for U.S. warplanes. Intercepts in the zone occurred about 60 times from 2007 to 2017, The New York Times reported last year.

Miller said the Russian bombers, decades-old aircraft classified by NATO as the “Bear,” were flying in accordance with international norms. The aircraft are capable of carrying nuclear bombs, but it unclear what weapons they had on board, if any.

A Russian Defense Ministry statement released Friday diverged from the U.S. military account. They said the bombers were escorted by fighter jets and a reconnaissance jet that also acts as an anti-submarine platform.

Miller said that was not true.

“This was a safe intercept, which did not include a Russian recon plane, and no Russian fighters were present,” he told said Saturday.