MOSCOW, July 23. /TASS/. A NATO reconnaissance aircraft that has come from Romania is circling around Russia’s Kaliningrad Region, a source in the EU air traffic control services told TASS.

"A NATO Bombardier Challenger 650 Artemis II reconnaissance and target acquisition aircraft has again been spotted in the area of the Kaliningrad Region around which it is performing its flight at an altitude of nearly 10 km, using the airspace of Lithuania and Poland, as well as areas over neutral waters of the Baltic Sea," the source said. He noted that the aircraft arrived in the area from its base airfield in Constanta, Romania.

The source recalled that the reconnaissance plane performed a similar flight on Tuesday, and on July 7 and 8 it appeared near the Russian region for two days in a row, shuttling along one and the same trajectory. Then it was escorted at several parts of his route by a Boeing RC-135W Rivet Joint electronic reconnaissance aircraft of the British Air Force that flew in from RAF Waddington for this purpose.

Over the past few months, air traffic controllers have recorded nearly a dozen similar flights of the Bombardier Challenger 650 Artemis II near the Kaliningrad Region. Furthermore, an EU air traffic control source told TASS that the aircraft also flew from south to north and back through the airspace of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, turning each time near the coast of the Gulf of Finland, but did not approach the border areas of these countries with Russia and Belarus.