Russian military plane bursts into flames and crashes into a lake 

A Russian military plane has caught fire and crashed into a lake in a northwestern region of Russia bordering Finland, state media said.

The military plane crashed in the Murmansk region after catching fire, the TASS news agency said on Wednesday, citing law enforcement agencies.

The MIG-31 fighter plane, which was reportedly on a training flight, “crashed down in an uninhabited area,” TASS quoted the ministry as saying. The pilots were ejected, the agency added, and were found “alive and well” after the drama.

According to preliminary data, the plane fell into a lake, TASS had previously said. The report did not provide any information about the cause of the aircraft catching fire.

Videos emerged online showing the jet shortly before the crash.

Set against a backdrop of snowy mountains, the jet could be seen hovering overhead with flames and smoke behind it, before disappearing from view over a tree line – seconds before plunging into the ground.

An eyewitness said the plane burst into flames on takeoff. “The plane took off and everything was already on fire,” the witness told Readovka news outlet.

The cause of the crash remains unclear. An official investigation is underway.

The plane crashed near the village of Rizh-Guba, close to Lake Imandra – a vast lake with several islands.

Murmansk is a region in the Arctic Circle on Russia’s Kola Peninsula in the far northwest. It borders both Norway and Finland – both members of NATO.

Moscow has a large military presence on the peninsula, while Russian military bases there house the world’s largest concentration of nuclear weapons.

This would act as a deterrent against Moscow’s enemies, as the military presence there was recently bolstered amid Vladimir Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

The crash is the latest disaster to befall a Russian plane, after one of Putin’s warplanes accidentally bombed the Russian town of Belgorod near the Ukrainian border in a humiliating blunder last week.

Belgorod was also the site of a plane crash in February this year, when a Russian Su-25 plane crashed near the Ukrainian border. While the pilot was able to jump out of the cockpit, he later died of his injuries.

In the photo: the plane crashes over the Russian region of Murmansk on Wednesday

The crash also comes after Russia and China signed a memorandum of understanding on Wednesday morning on strengthening maritime law enforcement cooperation — in the same region where the plane crashed.

And yesterday, British and German warplanes scrambled to intercept two Russian jets and a spy plane that nearly invaded NATO airspace over the Baltic Sea.

The UK and Germany sent Eurofighter Typhoon jets from Amari Air Base in Estonia to identify the two Sukhoi Su-27 fighters escorting an Ilyushin Il-20 Coot-A intelligence aircraft, the RAF said.

The Russian fighter jets and spy plane were flying over the Baltic Sea, close to Estonian airspace, when they were intercepted yesterday in the latest tense aerial encounter between Moscow and the West.