Hamburg, Germany: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plane took a longer route to reach the G20 Summit, 2017 in Hamburg of Germany. The Russian jet flying from Moscow to Hamburg on Thursday deviated from the direct route over Belarus and Poland on Thursday, as per Flightradar24 website.
Questions have been raised about whether Putin feared being shot down because of raging tensions with NATO which is an intergovernmental military alliance between several North American and European states.
Poland and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have clearly criticised Moscow since Russia has occupied Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
Jet with registration number: RA-96022 flew over the Baltic Sea, crossing neutral Finland and Sweden before entering the airspace of Denmark and Germany.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the reasons for Putin’s detour of 30 miles, saying only that the president’s security during trips was important. “The (safety) measures which are taken are expedient measures,” he told a conference call with reporters, as per DailyMail.
Russian Prime Minister had a meeting with Trump on Friday. He was shown by media on Television as emerging from a plane with the same registration number. Interestingly, only this time his plane had taken a longer route. Soviet republics like Poland, are members of NATO and the European Union.
The region is a flashpoint for tensions between Russia and the Western allies, hosting U.S. and NATO troops, to Moscow’s displeasure. Planes carrying Putin over the past 12 months always took direct routes when flying over EU countries, according to data on FlightRadar24. They did not fly over Ukraine, which has closed off its airspace to flights by Russian airlines.
Putin repeatedly flew over Poland during the period, including for his previous European visit in May, and passed over the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius last October.