Japanese fighter jets were scrambled twice on Thursday against Russian military aircraft conducting suspected reconnaissance activities, Japan's defense ministry said.
A Newsweek map, built using available geospatial data, illustrates the separate paths said to have been flown by a Russian Air Force Il-20M intelligence-gathering plane in the morning and a Russian Navy Il-38M maritime patrol aircraft in the afternoon. Both were photographed by Japan Air Self-Defense Force pilots.
The report by the Joint Staff of Japan's Self-Defense Forces said the Il-20M flew a long-range sortie in a southwesterly direction, along the western coastline of the main Japanese islands of Hokkaido and Honshu. Both planes later turned toward the continent for the Peter the Great Gulf, where the headquarters of Russia's Pacific Fleet is located, according to the flight paths.
Japan, a longtime U.S. security treaty ally, shares maritime borders with South Korea—another U.S. ally—but is also neighbors with potential adversaries in Russia, North Korea and China.
Tokyo routinely publishes what it describes as notable military aircraft and ship movements around its archipelagic territory. Its northern air force bases last scrambled jets against a Russian Il-20M in early February, one of 174 times Japanese jets intercepted Russia's military planes in the 2023 financial year that ended March 31, recent statistics showed.
The April 25 maneuvers captured by Japan were the first notable sorties by Russian reconnaissance aircraft this financial year, after a pair of Tu-95MS bombers and Su-30SM fighter escorts flew over Japan's northern seas earlier this month.
Russia's defense ministry couldn't be reached for comment before publication.
A separate map published by Newsweek this week illustrated dozens of flights around Japan by Russian and Chinese military aircraft, which collectively triggered nearly 700 Japanese air force emergency launches in the last 12 months, according to Tokyo's data.
While the majority of scrambles in the previous financial year—nearly 60 percent—took place in its southwestern airspace against Chinese aircraft, Japan sent up interceptors 222 times, or 33 percent, to head off possible airspace violations from the north and west, its defense ministry said.
Both the Il-20M and the Il-38M are Ilyushin aircraft of Soviet design. The former is known by the NATO reporting name Coot-A and was intercepted by German fighter jets earlier this month in the Baltic Sea.
The Il-20M, made for electronic intelligence collection, carries antennas, radars and other sensing and communications hardware. In 2018, Syrian air defenses mistakenly shot one down over the Mediterranean Sea.
The Il-38N, the latest variant of the airframe sometimes known as the Il-38SD, was built for anti-submarine warfare and is known by the NATO reporting name May. The aircraft is distinguishable by the magnetic anomaly detector on its tail, as well as by the equipment on its forward fuselage—an infrared search radar underneath and a box-like signals intelligence system above.
About 30 Soviet-made Il-38 planes remain in service with Russia's naval aviation, according to the U.S. Army-run ODIN database of modern military technologies.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
John Feng is Newsweek's contributing editor for Asia based in Taichung, Taiwan. His focus is on East Asian politics. He ... Read more
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