A US Air Force RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft carried out a surveillance flight from the RAF base in Mildenhall, United Kingdom, traveling along the Black Sea toward Sochi before returning to Europe. The information was reported by the flight-tracking service Flightradar24.
The American Boeing RC-135U covered a long route that passed through the airspace of several European nations, including the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. After reaching the Black Sea, the aircraft followed the Crimean coastline, flying close to the Russian border before turning westward.
By Moscow time, the reconnaissance plane had already traversed the territories of the Czech Republic and Germany, continuing its course back toward its base in Britain.
Flightradar24’s publicly available data regularly records such reconnaissance flights near Russian territory, typically carried out by US or NATO aircraft for observation and intelligence purposes over the Black Sea region.
The RC-135U’s flight from the UK to the Russian coast near Sochi underscores ongoing NATO and US surveillance operations in the Black Sea area.