US Spy Plane Restarts Snooping on Russia as Trump Loses Patience With Putin

A U.S. Air Force spy plane has flown a fresh sortie close to Russian territory after spending months in the Middle East, flight data shows.

The RC-135V Rivet Joint by the call sign “JAKE17” took off from a British air force base on Tuesday and crossed friendly airspace in Europe, making its way up to Finland via the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, according to Newsweek‘s analysis of signals recorded by the website Flightradar24.

The reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering aircraft skirted around the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad before returning to the United Kingdom. The chunk of Russian soil on the Baltic Sea is sandwiched between NATO members Lithuania and Poland.

In May, the aircraft was sent to the Middle East, stopping at the U.S.’s largest air base in the region, Al Udeid. The base on the outskirts of Doha, the Qatari capital, came under Iranian attack last month after the U.S. bombed three major Iranian nuclear sites.

The Rivet Joint typically flies around NATO’s eastern flank with Russia and Belarus, as well as on the edge of the Black Sea—not far from the Russian-controlled Crimean Peninsula seized from Ukraine in 2014.

The Boeing-built aircraft gathers signals intelligence, hoovering up messages and data from various sources. It is crewed by more than 30 people, including electronic warfare officers and intelligence operators, according to the Air Force.

The U.S.’s RC-135 platforms—including the missile-tracking Cobra Ball and radar mapping Combat Sent—are assigned to Air Combat Command and based at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. The spy planes first flew in the 1960s and are expected to remain in service well into the 2040s.

The U.K.’s Royal Air Force, which operates its own Rivet Joint fleet, often sends its reconnaissance aircraft around Kaliningrad and the broader eastern flank. One of the Rivet Joint planes traveled over the top of Denmark, through Sweden and up to the Finnish border with Russia earlier this month, according to available flight data.

Two days earlier in late June, the same aircraft traveled to and from the Black Sea after circling Kaliningrad. The plane had also been sent to Al Udeid in April and returned to the U.K. last month.

Russia is likely returning to the forefront of U.S. President Donald Trump’s mind after violence flared in the Middle East last month during the “12-day war” between Israel and Iran, in which the U.S. became briefly but directly involved.

NATO members on the alliance’s eastern flank have become increasingly concerned over whether Russia could mount a concerted attack against a NATO country in the coming years, particularly as the U.S. pivots away from Europe and turns its attention to the Indo-Pacific.

Though Trump had pledged to end the Ukraine war in a single day, he has more recently acknowledged the difficulty of securing a ceasefire agreement. In March, Kyiv agreed to a deal put forward by the U.S., but Moscow refused to sign.

In a fresh indication that Trump’s patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin was wearing thin, he said on Tuesday that the U.S. had had “a lot of bulls*** thrown at us by Putin.” He added, “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

The Republican had largely sidestepped overtly criticizing the Kremlin leader in the early months of negotiations handled by his administration. But Russia, rather than moving closer to a peace deal, has intensified its aerial bombardment of Ukraine, which regularly reports large-scale, lethal airstrikes across the country. Officials on Tuesday said Moscow had launched its largest aerial assault of the war overnight, firing 13 missiles and more than 700 drones.

Last week, Trump said he was “very disappointed” after a call with Putin.