Russian Su-30 fighter jet crashes in Kaliningrad

A Russian Su-30SM fighter jet crashed during a training flight in the Chernyakhovsk district of Russia’s Kaliningrad region, coming down between the villages of Timofeyevka and Zelyony Bor, and both pilots ejected before impact.

The two crew members were injured and taken to a military hospital, and Russian outlets published the first details of the crash, including the location of the wreckage.

The Chernyakhovsk district lies in the east of the Russian exclave, which sits on the Baltic coast between NATO members Poland and Lithuania and is home to the headquarters of Russia’s Baltic Fleet. The area hosts a military air base used by Baltic Fleet naval aviation, which operates Su-30SM fighters alongside other combat aircraft, and the jets regularly fly training sorties over the region and the Baltic Sea.

The Su-30SM is a two-seat multirole fighter built by Irkut, part of the state-owned United Aircraft Corporation, and it serves with both the Russian Aerospace Forces and Russian Naval Aviation in air defense, strike and maritime attack roles. Its two-seat cockpit carries a pilot and a weapon systems officer, both equipped with ejection seats, which allowed the crew to escape the aircraft before it hit the ground.

The crash is the latest in a series of Su-30 losses in noncombat flights over the past year. In April, a Su-30 went down in Crimea during a scheduled training flight, the Russian Defense Ministry said at the time, and in November 2025 a Su-30 crashed in the Prionezhsky district of Karelia, killing both crew members.

Russia’s Su-30 fleet has been flying at a high tempo since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, both in combat missions over Ukraine and the Black Sea and in training and patrol flights elsewhere, and Russian Naval Aviation has lost several of the jets during that period. A commission will investigate the cause of the Kaliningrad crash, with technical failure and pilot error typically among the first lines of inquiry in Russian military aviation accidents.