Swedish authorities said a Russian military jet nearly collided with a commercial passenger airplane on Friday in international airspace near southern Sweden, however Russia insisted on Sunday its military jet was dozens of miles away, The Huffington Post reported.
It's the second time this year Swedish authorities have claimed a Russian plane nearly collided with a passenger jet over Sweden.
Sweden announced the incident on Saturday, saying that the Russian intelligence plane had turned off its transponders to avoid commercial radar and came dangerously close to colliding with a passenger jet.
"The military aircraft had no transponder but we discovered it on our radar and warned the civilian air traffic control in Malmo," Daniel Josefsson of the Swedish battle command center told daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter on Saturday, reported CBC News.
Russian officials responded saying that the two planes were never less than 42 miles apart, reported Huffington Post.
"A flight was carried out in strict accordance with international rules on air space and did not violate the borders of other countries and was at a safe distance from the flight paths of civilian airplanes," said Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Major Igor Konashenko, reported CBC News.
The commercial airline company operating the plane, Scandinavian Airlines, agreed that the incident has been blown out of proportion, saying that the Russian craft kept a safe distance.
"This has been blown out of all proportion, completely," SAS spokesman Knut Morten Johansen said, reported HuffPo. "It wasn't even an incident." According to Johansen, there was no breach "because the safety distance between aircraft hadn't been exceeded."
However, Swedish air force chief, Maj. Gen. Micael Byden, said the incident looked "pretty serious," but not as serious as the first incident back in March, when a Russian plane without transponders reportedly came within 300 feet of another SAS plane.
Several reports of Russian planes straying too close to foreign airspace and being intercepted have made the news in the past few months, including incidents near the U.S.-Alaskan border and the Canadian border.
Russia has said it will be expanding its military flights to the Gulf of Mexico and even along U.S. coasts.
CNN reported in November that NATO has scrambled fighter jets more than 400 times this year to intercept Russian military planes flying close to foreign airspace in Europe.
In October, NATO intercepted at least 19 Russian planes flying in three different regions far outside Russian airspace, reported ABC News. A few days prior to this, seven more planes were intercepted over the Baltic Sea.
With the increasingly strenuous relations between Russia and the West over the Ukrainian crisis, Russia's expanding military display has some worrying that the world is entering into an era comparable to the Cold War.
