Six crew members have died after a Russian nuclear-capable strategic bomber crashed during a training flight in the country's far east, the Defense Ministry said Tuesday.
A ministry statement confirmed that the Tu-95 aircraft came down in an uninhabited part of the Amur region. One crew member survived the crash and was taken to hospital with injuries.
Officials confirmed the bomber was unarmed at the time, and a team of military investigators has flown to the site to determine what caused the incident, according to the ministry.
Local authorities said the crash occurred near the village of Krasnoyarovo on the Zeya River, close to the border with China. The regional administration said that the pilots "did all they could to steer the plane away from residential buildings."
The Tu-95 is a four-engine turboprop strategic nuclear bomber dating back to Cold War times. The Russian military has frequently deployed the large warplane to fire conventional cruise missiles into Ukraine throughout the conflict, which has lasted more than four and a half years.
A number of Russian Tu-95 bombers were damaged or destroyed in June 2025 during Ukraine's "Spiderweb" operation, in which covertly truck-launched drones struck several air bases hosting long-range bomber aircraft across Russia.
“Operation Spiderweb” was planned over the course of 18 months and executed by Ukraine’s SBU security service. Truckloads of drones were smuggled thousands of kilometres into Russian territory before being unleashed close to airbases with the goal of destroying as many aircraft as possible, officials in Kyiv said.
In a rare confirmation of such losses, Russia said at the time that Ukraine attacked airfields across five regions, which caused several aircraft to catch fire.
“The attacks occurred in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan, and Amur regions. Air defences repelled the assaults in all but two regions, Murmansk and Irkutsk,” Moscow’s defence ministry claimed.
Satellite images showed a before-and-after view of the airfield located in Irkutsk, a Siberian region. The images depicted dismantled debris and ashen remains of several aircraft located along the runway of the Belaya military air base or parked in protective revetments nearby.
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