On Wednesday, a Russian Su-30 crashed during a scheduled training flight in the Kaliningrad region. Moscow’s Defence Ministry: the crew ejected and was picked up by a ground search-and-rescue team. It did not give a cause. Nor whether the pilots were injured. The jet was not carrying weapons. A crash and an ejection. Not a confirmed cause. Dump Kyiv Independent.

TASS, from the same statement: the pilots’ lives are not in danger. The aircraft came down in an uninhabited area. That is the ministry’s line. It is not a diagnosis. The pro-Kremlin Mash channel: near Chernyakhovsk, in a field between Timofeevka and Zeleny Bor. Both pilots, at a military hospital, with injuries. Two accounts of the bodies. The ministry is silent on wounds. Mash puts them in. Do not mix them.

The Kyiv Independent: Chernyakhovsk is about 90 kilometres east of Kaliningrad. Mash and Mail.ru: the wreck, about five kilometres east of Chernyakhovsk. Two distances. Ninety is the town. Five is the field. Do not mix them. Mash and Izvestia write Su-30SM. The ministry, through TASS, Su-30. Stay with Su-30 for the communiqué.

The Su-30 is a twin-seat, twin-engine fighter. Training, without ammunition, Moscow says. The cause, unstated. This is not the Tu-95 in Amur in September, with six dead. Another aircraft. Another month. It is not the Chelyabinsk Su-30 already written.

The Kyiv Independent ties the crash to NATO tension over the exclave. That is the paper’s context. It is not the cause of the accident. The ministry gave no cause.

Dump Kyiv Independent. The rewrite rests on the Kyiv Independent and on TASS, from the Defence Ministry statement.

Image: Chernyakhovsk, Kaliningrad region, 5 May 2025, Artem Svetlov, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The town, not Wednesday’s wreck.

Sources consulted: Su-30 aircraft crashes in Russia’s westernmost Kaliningrad Region — TASS.