I think shooting down the planes in situation as such is a dangerous path. For one thing, it leads to Russia returning the favour when circumstances permit.
Here is what happened, according to the Estonian MoD:
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The Migs (actually one of them as reported by Swedes, no word on the other two that I saw) were armed with short range A2A missiles (or was it medium range?). They posed no threat at any time of their flight to the allied assets. In my opinion, it was a calculated move and I still think this is signalling in order to reestablish conventional deterrence.
@Redshift, I would be interested to know, which act do you think is more “hostile”, the three jets discussed above or the following: in March 2023, a B-52 was flying the same path towards Russia and sharply turned south 200 km before St Petersburg, flying towards Kaliningrad, turning west just north of it. This is its partial flight pass (more can be found
here):
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To be clear, it never entered the Russian airspace.
A couple opinions that I generally agree with:
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I this is not an unlikely outcome in the current paranoid environment:
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This is a follow up to the first post by Foreman, provided the context of second (completely separate post):