British plane fired on by Russian jet after misheard order, US officials say

A Russian jet locked on to and fired a missile at a British plane last year because of a misheard order, according to US defence officials, and was only prevented from shooting down the RAF surveillance aircraft because the munition malfunctioned.

Two defence officials with knowledge of the incident, over the Black Sea on Sept 29, told the New York Times it was far more serious than originally reported and could have amounted to an act of war.

According to the US officials, the Russian pilot of the Su-27 fighter involved in the incident misinterpreted commands from a ground controller and released a missile at the RAF jet.

One of the officials described the incident as “really, really scary”.

The British RC-135 Rivet Joint, a surveillance aircraft that can carry up to 30 people, was listening into communications between the Su-27 pilot and ground control, the officials told the newspaper.

The Russian pilot misinterpreted what a radar operator said and believed he had permission to fire, they said. The missile was fired but did not work.

It is possible the missile was decoyed by the suite of defensive countermeasures carried by the RAF aircraft. An RAF spokesman refused to speculate as to why the missile did not function correctly.

The US officials’ comments build on one of the Pentagon documents recently leaked online, which described the incident as a “near-shootdown”.

In October, Ben Wallace, the Defence Secretary, told parliament that a Russian jet had released a missile in the “vicinity” of a British aircraft. He said he did not consider the move a deliberate escalation as the Kremlin had described it to him as a “technical malfunction”.

In response to claims the incident was a deliberate attempt to shoot down a British plane, a UK defence official said a significant proportion of the content of the leaked reports was “untrue, manipulated, or both”.

“We strongly caution against anybody taking the veracity of these claims at face value and would also advise them to take time to question the source and purpose of such leaks,” the official added.

Elsewhere, the leaked Pentagon documents alleged Vladimir Putin personally intervened in the bitter feud between the Wagner Group and Russia’s defence ministry.

The document, which was not part of the initial leak of classified US material, highlights the depths of in-fighting between various arms of the Russian state over the invasion of Ukraine.

It alleges that the Russian president arranged a meeting in the hope of ending a dispute between Yevgeny Prigozhin, Wagner’s founder, and Sergei Shoigu, the Russian defence minister.

Mr Prigozhin, a wealthy businessman and close ally of the Kremlin leader, has repeatedly accused the Russian defence ministry of withholding much-needed ammunition supplies to his mercenaries on the front line.

“The meeting almost certainly concerned, at least in part, Prigozhin’s public accusations and resulting tension with Shoygu,” the document, reported by the New York Times said.

Information from the latest 27-page leak was obtained via electronic intercepts collected by American intelligence agencies.

Among them was a report on a separate row between Russia’s domestic intelligence agency and the country’s ministry of defence.

The FSB accused the military of obscuring the scale of casualties Moscow’s forces have suffered since the invasion of Ukraine almost 14 months ago.

The latest document does not specify any figures the Russian defence ministry is circulating within the government.

But when Mr Shoigu last September publicly disclosed the Russian death toll, he claimed just 5,937 troops had been killed since the beginning of the war.

The FSB “calculated the actual number of Russian wounded and killed in action was closer to 110,000”, according to the US intelligence document.

Moscow’s intelligence agency argued the military did not include the dead and wounded from the Russian National Guard, the Wagner mercenaries or Chechen fighters led by Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Kremlin warlord.

The row highlights the “continuing reluctance of military officials to convey bad news up the chain of command”, according to US officials.

Washington has previously estimated Russian losses at around 200,000 killed or wounded soldiers.

Separately leaked documents state that Moscow had suffered between 189,500 and 223,000 casualties as of February, including up to 43,000 killed in action.

The latest trove of documents were also leaked on Discord, a platform predominantly used by computer gamers.

Pentagon officials have previously warned the leaks posed a “very serious” risk to US national security.

The documents were authentic but could have contained outdated, inaccurate or altered information, they added.

Officials did not dispute the information contained in the latest leaked documents, according to the New York Times, but would not verify their contents.