“Our fighter jet was on a combat mission in Northern Syria in very dense cloud conditions. When the aircraft was passing along the Turkish border, the onboard equipment set off an alarm indicating the plane was being targeted by some kind of air defense system,” Commander-in-Chief Viktor Bondarev told Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.

“The pilot had to take a split-second decision to perform an anti-missile maneuver. Well, [the plane] went a little bit into Turkish airspace. We acknowledged it frankly,” Bondarev added.