NATO Submarine Hunter Keeps Tabs on Russia's Baltic Fleet

British reconnaissance aircraft were among several NATO assets that closely scrutinized Russia's forces in the Baltic Sea this week, according to publicly available flight data.

One of the GPS signals broadcast on Wednesday, recorded by the aircraft tracking service Flightradar24, belonged to a Royal Air Force P-8A Poseidon, a maritime patrol aircraft known in the U.K. as the Poseidon MRA1.

Newsweek's map, displaying Coordinated Universal Time, traces the British submarine hunter's eight-hour flight from Lossiemouth air base in Moray, in northeastern Scotland, to the scan the borders of Russia's Kaliningrad region, utilizing friendly airspace over Denmark and Poland in the process.

Russia relies heavily on the Baltic Sea for oil trade from major ports such as Primorsk in the northwest. Its navy's Baltic Fleet is headquartered in Kaliningrad, a semi-exclave, and has a base in St. Petersburg, President Vladimir Putin's hometown.

NATO's intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, sorties in the region often are disclosed to the public.

The alliance says Russian spy planes fly with their transponders off and do not communicate with civilian air traffic control, posing a risk to aviation safety and necessitating intercepts by allied air policing units.

The sea and airspace near Kaliningrad, Russia's westernmost stronghold, has only become more contested since its invasion of Ukraine, with analysts frequently observing suspected GPS jamming—a form of electronic warfare—in the area.

Russia's Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment after hours.

China-sanctioned Boeing Defense took less than two years to deliver nine Poseidon MRA1 to the RAF by 2022. The $4 billion fleet is equipped for anti-submarine warfare, but its powerful sensors can be used for ISR or search and rescue missions.

Before receiving its first Poseidon MRA1, Britain was left "without effective long-range, fixed-wing maritime cover," according to the RAF, after its Nimrod patrol planes were decommissioned a decade earlier.

The RAF's maritime patrol planes all operate out of RAF Lossiemouth, one of two U.K. air bases that host quick reaction alert squadrons of Eurofighter Typhoon fast jets.

The Poseidon MRA1's mission this week was its second reconnaissance flight this month under the call sign RFR7040, following a similar pattern flown on August 2, according to records on Flightradar24.

It also was far from the only British aircraft to keep tabs on Russia's forces. Newsweek's map separately tracks at least five sorties near Kaliningrad by two RC-135W Rivet Joint electronic and signals intelligence-gathering planes, operating out of RAF Waddington in eastern England.

GPS data showed that, on August 15, one of the British Rivet Joints swept Finland's eastern border with Russia until it reached the Barents Sea, where it looped around the Kola Peninsula to watch Severomorsk, Russia's Northern Fleet garrison in the Murmansk region, inside the Arctic Circle.

The high-intensity ISR sorties are frequently augmented by uncrewed drone flights and missions by other NATO members including the United States, whose own submarine-hunting Poseidons operate out of Naval Air Station Sigonella, on Italy's Mediterranean island of Sicily.

On NATO's southeastern flank, American and British aircraft snoop on Russian forces near the Black Sea nearly every day, flight records show.

The British Defense Ministry and the U.S. Defense Department typically decline to comment on specific operations.

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