Russian bomber intercepted near Alaska as search continues for downed ‘objects’

After days of shooting down unidentified “objects,” Canadian and US warplanes scrambled to intercept four Russian military jets Monday night as they hovered over US airspace.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command, which spotted the group of long-range bombers and Russian fighter escorts as it approached Alaska, described the incident as a normal occurrence that posed no threat.

Norad also dismissed the Russian flight as unrelated to the series of suspicious balloons shot down in the skies over North America, even as the search for remains of those objects continued Tuesday over the central Yukon and Lake Huron.

Air traffic observers were first alerted to another possible incident Monday night when they noticed a Canadian Armed Forces aircraft heading northwest from Cold Lake, Alta., using a call sign associated with air intercepts.

The CC-150 Polaris refueling plane, whose flight path from Cold Lake can be traced on open source websites, returned home in the predawn hours Tuesday morning. The Air Force said the CF-18s have also been deployed alongside US aircraft.

In a statement issued hours later, Norad revealed that it had intercepted a group of Russian aircraft made up of Tu-95 long-range bombers and Su-35 fighter jets as they approached Alaskan airspace.

“The Russian aircraft remained in international airspace and did not enter American or Canadian sovereign airspace,” Norad said. “This Russian activity… is not seen as a threat, nor is it seen as a provocation.”

The appearance of a Russian military plane near Alaska comes after a US warplane shot down what authorities described as an “object” but increasingly appears to have been a balloon, off the northeast coast of the state. on Friday.

A second “object” was destroyed over central Yukon on Saturday and a third over Lake Huron on Sunday. Authorities have said little about the objects, although Prime Minister Justin Trudeau indicated on Tuesday that they are balloons.

“What we are seeing is that there are a variety of different balloons that appear to be different sizes and numbers,” he told reporters before meeting cabinet ministers on Parliament Hill.

“We are now continuing to do as much searching as we can to try to find and recover these items to learn more about them. What is very clear is that they were a threat to civilian travel, to commercial aircraft.”

In its statement, Norad ruled out any direct connection between these alleged balloons and the deployment of Russian bombers to North America, which Moscow has done sporadically since 2007.

“Norad also assesses that this Russian flight activity is in no way related to recent operations by Norad and US Northern Command associated with airborne objects over North America over the past two weeks,” it said.

Norad did not say whether there have been any other long-range Russian bomber flights this year, or how many there were last year.

Meanwhile, as the Canadian and US militaries continued to scan the skies for more potential threats, efforts to recover debris from downed objects in the Yukon and Lake Huron were making little progress.

In an update outside the House of Commons, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino and Fisheries Minister Joyce Murray, head of the Canadian Coast Guard, said the wreckage had not yet been recovered.

“It is important to highlight that the sections of land in the Yukon where operations are being carried out are very remote, difficult to access, and even more so given the current conditions,” Mendicino said.

“Given the fact that there is a lot of snow, a lot of wind, etcetera, you will appreciate that this will take some time.”

Officials were also trying to determine where the object landed in Lake Huron. A US warplane destroyed it with a second missile after it missed the first on Sunday, US Army top commander General Mark Milley told reporters in Brussels.

Mendicino did not speculate on how long the two searches, which come at the same time as US officials search the seas off the Alaskan coast for the third object, would continue.

“It’s important to defer to the experts in the field, so the Military, RCMP and Coast Guard will be better placed to provide answers to those questions,” he said.

“I’ll just say that I know there’s a lot of constant curiosity to get to the bottom of all of this. I’m aware of. And that’s why we provided a report from those agencies yesterday, and we’ll continue to look to them to answer those questions.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on February 14, 2023.