Russian enlightener over the Baltic Sea
This infamous aircraft intercept NATO from Rügen
Updated on March 28, 2025 – 4:20 p.m.Reading time: 2 min.
The Iljuschin Il-20m has been looking for Russian perspective-and excitement among neighboring countries for decades. Now it has been received again.
The Iljuschin IL-20M is a reconnaissance aircraft that has been in the service of the Soviet armed forces since the late 1960s. Developed based on the passenger and transport aircraft IL-18, it was converted for electronic education and visual surveillance.
The Air Force confirmed T-Online that it was an IL-20M that approached NATO-related airspace without a transponder signal and without radio contact. According to the Air Force, the incident occurred at around 9.14 a.m. when a striking flight movement over the Kaliningrad area triggered the NATO command center in Uedem alarm.
Two Eurofighter from the Rostock Laage air force base then rose in the alarm process and visually identified the machine at 9.49 a.m. The German pilots escorted the plane for a few minutes until it turned and flew towards Kaliningrad. The incident remained without injury to the NATO airspace.
Such operations are part of the so -called “Quick Reaction Alert”, with which NATO reacts to unidentified or non -communicating flight movements near her airspace.
The Iljuschin IL-20M is equipped with numerous sensors, antennas and camera systems and serves the electronic information (sigint), radio recording (Comint) and optical surveillance. The striking radar domes and sensor containers on the fuselage and wing are particularly striking. The machine can locate radar and radio sources, listen to conversations and locate air defense systems.
Between 1958 and 1976, the Russian aircraft manufacturer Iljuschin built a total of 19 pieces of the reconnaissance flyers.
Russia uses the IL-20M primarily at the limits of NATO. Your regular flights close to NATO boundaries are not only considered a provocation, but also as a test of the responsiveness of western air spaces. Again and again the machine is spotted above the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea or the Arctic. NATO leads the propeller-driven machine under the code name “Coot-A”.
The guy was particularly well known by an incident in 2018, when an IL-20M over Syria was accidentally shot down by the Syrian air defense. All 15 Russian soldiers died on board. Moscow blamed Israel for the incident, which led to diplomatic tensions.
