Japan said its fighter jets had used flares for the first time to warn a Russian surveillance plane to leave Japanese airspace, the Defense Ministry in Tokyo said, amid rising tensions over growing military cooperation between Russia and China in the region.
Japan's Defense Minister, Minoru Kihara, said an undisclosed number of F-15 and F-35 fighter jets were scrambled and fired flares on Monday after a Russian II-38 maritime patrol plane appeared to ignore radio warnings.
Kihara said it was the first publicly announced violation of Japanese airspace by a Russian aircraft since June 2019, when Tu-95 bombers entered Japanese airspace around southern Okinawa and the Izu Islands south of Tokyo.
He said the Russian plane had flown in the area for five hours and violated the airspace over Rebun island, off Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, three times.
“This violation of our airspace is extremely regrettable, and we today lodged a strong protest through diplomatic channels to the Russian government and strongly urged them to prevent a recurrence,” Kihara added.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had instructed government officials to respond to the incident “firmly and calmly” and to cooperate with the United States and other countries.
“We will refrain from providing specific information about the intentions or objectives of this action, but Russian forces have been operating near our country's waters since the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Hayashi added.
Kihara said the use of flares was a legitimate response to an airspace violation and that “we intend to use them without hesitation.”
The incursion came a day after a joint flotilla of Chinese and Russian warships sailed near Japan's northern coast. Kihara said the airspace violation could be linked to joint military exercises announced by Russia and China earlier this month.
Japanese defense officials are concerned about growing military cooperation between China and Russia and increasingly assertive Chinese activity around Japan's territorial waters and airspace, which has prompted the government to significantly strengthen the defense of southwestern Japan, including on outlying islands that are seen as key to Japan's defense strategy in the region.
In early September, Russian military aircraft flew over southern Japanese airspace, and in late August, a Chinese Y-9 reconnaissance plane briefly violated southern Japanese airspace.
China's aircraft carrier Liaoning, accompanied by two destroyers, sailed between Yonaguni Island, Japan's westernmost point, and Iriomote Island, approaching Japanese territorial waters.
Japan's Air Self-Defense Force said it conducted 669 scrambles between April 2023 and March 2024. About 70% of those were aimed at Chinese military aircraft, but that figure does not include airspace violations.
Japan and Russia are locked in a territorial dispute over the Northern Territories, a group of Russian islands seized from Japan by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. The dispute has prevented the two countries from signing a peace treaty to formally end hostilities.
Bilateral tensions have also risen over Japan's support for Ukraine, which has offered financial and material assistance to Kiev and imposed sanctions on Russian individuals and entities.
