Key Points and Summary – Russia’s FSB claims UK MI6 and Ukraine’s HUR tried to recruit MiG-31K crew to deliver a Kinzhal-armed jet to NATO territory, boosting a bounty from $1M to $3M and promising citizenship.
-The plan hinges on a rear-seat navigator poisoning the pilot and then flying to Romania or Odesa.
Russia’s MiG-31 Fighter. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
MiG-31 Russian Air Force. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
-Aviation experts note the navigator cannot safely land a MiG-31 from the back seat, making the caper implausible.
-Journalist Christo Grozev calls the “evidence” forged, citing AI imagery and synthetic audio; Romania also dismissed the tale. Most non-Russian sources judge the episode propaganda theater, not a foiled operation.
Russia’s FSB Claims UK Had Plot to Hijack MiG-31K
WARSAW, POLAND – On Tuesday, November 11, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that it had foiled an alleged joint operation between the Ukrainian Military Intelligence Directorate (HUR) and MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service.
The goal of the operation was to recruit Russian pilots to steal a Mikoyan MiG-31K interceptor that would also be carrying a Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile.
The FSB said that Ukrainian intelligence officers had tried to recruit Russian aircrews by offering cash incentives. The initial offer for delivering the MiG-31K into allied hands was $1 million.
The bounty was then supposed to have increased to $3 million, provided the pilots delivered an aircraft that was also carrying the Kinzhal missile. The FSB additionally claims that one of the crew was promised citizenship in a Western nation if he could deliver the aircraft and missile together.
The Russian TASS and RIA news agencies quoted the FSB as saying the hijacked jet was to be flown to a NATO air base in the Romanian city of Constanta. The Russian agencies stated that the Russian jet could have been shot down by allied air defenses surrounding the aerodrome, ignoring the fact that any such real operation would have been coordinated with forces on the ground to provide the jet with safe passage.
FSB’s Claims of Ingenuity
The FSB is the main successor to the internal security directorate of the Soviet-era KGB and is based at the infamous Lubyanka Square building in Moscow. The security service said Ukraine and the UK had been planning a large-scale “provocation” by using the hijacked aircraft.
“The measures taken have thwarted the Ukrainian and British intelligence services’ plans for a large-scale provocation,” RIA cited the FSB as saying. Russian state-controlled TV channels showed pictures of messages and recordings of a man who they said was working for Ukrainian and British intelligence.
MiG-31 Flying High Russian Air Force. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Reuters and other news organizations could not independently verify the accounts presented on Russian airwaves. The media sites claim that the Russian air crew member initially contacted was not the pilot of the MiG-31, but rather the rear-seat navigator and weapons officer.
He supposedly received a message on Telegram from an unknown person who identified himself as an employee of the international investigative journalism agency Bellingcat. However, the entire story of how the FSB demonstrated such clever ingenuity begins to unravel almost immediately.
Mission Impossible
“This is not the first event that I have organized, and I say with full confidence that everything will go smoothly, we will also have a beer in Munich in the company of busty young ladies and remember this story with a smile,” the recruiter supposedly wrote to the Russian navigator in Telegram.
This plot sounds full of bravado and reckless folly, but it makes very little sense. The biggest problem with the supposed plan was the impossibility of the rear-seat navigator/WSO landing the aircraft safely.
The FSB claims the plan was to recruit a navigator pilot in the fall of 2024. That rear-seater was then supposed to poison the pilot by introducing some toxic chemical into his oxygen mask. The plot gets sketchy at this point, with one version having the MiG-31 land in Romania and then land a second time at an airfield in the Odessa region of Ukraine.
The fatal flaw is that there is indeed a control stick in the MiG-31’s rear cockpit, and the navigator can control the aircraft in flight; however, its functionality is limited.
Russian pilot Andrei Gribov explained in a video cited by the FSB that the navigator would never have been able to land the MiG-31 he hijacked.
“Landing from the rear cockpit [by the navigator pilot] is not provided for in the flight operations manual. Landing is impossible, it will lead to disaster,” he said. Moreover, another expert on the MiG-31 explained that in the event the pilot in the front cockpit becomes incapacitated, the navigator has very limited visibility from the rear seat. He can only pilot the aircraft into a situation where both can eject safely.
In such an instance, the aircraft would have been completely destroyed, and the mission would have largely been a failure.
The independent journalist Christo Grozev, who has previously worked with Bellingcat, has ridiculed the FSB’s claims as implausible and suggested the text messages attributed to him were forged.
Grozev said the FSB “dossier” was completely implausible and noted that it relies on an AI-generated face of one of the alleged conspirators. The speech soundtrack in the video circulated includes what he called stilted, artificial speech.
“Why would UK intelligence or Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence [HUR] recruit a non-existent journalist from an ‘undesirable’ organization that no Russian pilot would ever deal with?” he said.
The Romanian Foreign Ministry has also dismissed the story of this plot as a “fabricated tale akin to Soviet-era espionage fiction.”
Most intelligence sources outside of Russia have concluded that the story of this planned hijacking of a MiG-31 is little more than a Russian propaganda effort, rather than a success story for the FSB to crow about for having foiled a real Western covert operation.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson has thirty-six years of experience analyzing and reporting on foreign weapons systems, defense technologies, and international arms export policy. Johnson is the Director of the Asia Research Centre at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation. He is also a survivor of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He worked for years in the American defense industry as a foreign technology analyst and later as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Departments of the Navy and Air Force, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2022-2023, he won two awards in a row for his defense reporting. He holds a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University and a master’s degree from Miami University in Ohio, specializing in Soviet and Russian studies. He lives in Warsaw.
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Swamplaw Yankee
November 14, 2025 at 12:01 am
The real NAZI-like FSB story starts in POTUS Obama Democrat staffing. The 2008 staff preserve presented a great hunting ground for low intelligence Obama stalwarts. It was like the POTUS FDR staff preserve where Kremlin ruuzzkie cuddlers could get hired by the FDR regime.
Fast forward from 2008 to 2014. The NAZI-like FSB LONG GAME to ignite the traitor network hidden inside independent Ukraine was well financed by Putins Kremlin flunkies. All that was a bit unknown, tricky, was when the POTUS Obama would be over his Blather about sanctions on vague oligarchs! When would he finally be ready to covertly assume the mantle of Benedict Arnold.
The many Press Secretary sessions run by Jay Carney showed the fine tone of the NAZI-like FSB controllers. The Yankee MSM was beaten into spiritual submission. The fourth estate seemed drugged into cognitive submission. They could not question any disambiguation shovelled out of the OBAMA FSB prayer book. What was the closest the zenith of western MSM could reach? Can the reader guess the pathetic zenith of the Yankee MSM?
One timid brain from the fourth estate asked once, once if the big USA military machine might be activated by the POTUS Obama.
Can you believe it? The bullets of WW3 are flying and the YANKEE MSM are cowered that it is 1939 with FDR.
Over this critical short period the NATO member states stay so silent about spending even $5.00 on military action and/or assistance to Ukraine. Nothing from NATO or a member state appeared inside Ukraine.
Its not as if CANADA was suddenly activated to deal with its aggressive next door neighbour: Kremlin ruuzzkie.
OBAMA kept his press secretary muzzled and the MSM cooperated with the idiocy of sanctions fantasies.
Soon, he unilaterally, covertly, green lit the evil geopolitical loss to NATO of Ukraine’s vast Crimean soil, Families and extensive Black/Azov Sea jurisdictional zones to the prime vile COLD War enemy of the WEST, Kremlin ruuzzkie Putin. The mantle of Benedict Arnold was as historically solid on Obama as a cape of the USMC was on a Marine Officer. -30-