Last week, there were various Russian military aircraft spotted near Latvian air space, as LETA was told by National Armed Forces (NBS).
There were three flights performed by NATO air space patrol mission to respond to potential threats to Latvian air space.
NBS explain that without active transponders aircraft are invisible to civilian radars. The only way to detect them is by using military radars. In such cases, it is not possible to identify the type of object on radar. This is why the only way to verify is by visual identification, which is what the NATO fighter jets stationed in Baltic States do.
By the end of August this year, there were 109 cases of Russian military aircraft flying close to the external border of Latvia’s territorial waters in the Baltic Sea.
Last year there were a total of 159 such cases.