A Royal Air Force jet carrying British Defense Secretary John Healey had its signal jammed after it flew past the Russian border last week, The Times reported on Sunday.
Healey was returning from a visit to British soldiers stationed in southeast Estonia.
Alongside Healey, several political and military advisers, a lieutenant-general, two photographers, and a Times reporter were on board the flight.
The Times added that at the moment, it is unclear whether Healey was deliberately targeted.
According to the Times, the attack disabled the jet’s GPS for the remainder of the three-hour return flight.
Without shutting down and rebooting the jet completely in order to restore satellite signal, which is impossible to do while in the air, the pilots were forced to rely on “revisionary inertial navigation systems to calculate their location.”
The jam reportedly caused parts of the cockpit’s dashboard to malfunction as well.
One of the pilots described the matter to the Times as a rare incident that he hadn’t experienced “in a long time.”
Similarly, a defense source told the Times that the incident was a “reckless” move by Russia that had the potential to disrupt a civilian plane.
The RAF is “well prepared to deal with this,” the source added.
Russian fighter jets intercept British RAF planes over Black Sea
The incident comes only days after UK defense authorities disclosed that Russian fighter jets had on multiple occasions carried out dangerous interceptions of RAF reconnaissance flights in international airspace last month.
The interceptions risked a collision in what Healey had described as “dangerous and unacceptable.”
In the first engagement, a Russian Su-35 fighter jet came close enough to the aircraft, triggering its emergency systems and disabling its autopilot, and a Su-27 in a second engagement conducted six passes directly in front of the aircraft’s nose at roughly six meters.
According to the British Defense Ministry, this was the most serious interaction between Russian and British aircraft since 2022, when a Russian fighter released a missile near an RAF surveillance plane over the Black Sea.