MOSCOW, September 16 (RIA Novosti)-Russia and NATO member country Lithuania have issued conflicting statements Friday about when a Russian military pilot whose plane crashed in Lithuania may return home.
A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said: "Russia is clarifying all the details of the incident, and is taking all the necessary measures to ensure that the pilot is returned to [his] homeland."
Lithuanian prosecutors said Major Valery Troyanov, 36, had been called in for questioning after his Su-27 Flanker fighter bomber crashed Thursday about 55 kilometers (34 miles) north of Lithuania's second biggest city, Kuanas, apparently after navigation equipment failed.
However, the commander-in-chief of Lithuania's armed forces, Major General Vladas Tutkus said there would be no joint investigation into the incident, although he did say Russian investigators would be allowed the see the results of an analysis of the plane's flight recorders.
The Su-27 had been flying over the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea from St. Petersburg to Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave between European Union member countries Poland and Lithuania, when it veered off course into Lithuanian airspace, according to the Lithuanian Defense Ministry's Web site.
Meanwhile, Colonel-General Alexander Belousov, Russia's first deputy defense minister, has rejected claims made by the General Staff in another Baltic republic, Estonia, that Russian planes flying the same route had allegedly put civil aircraft in danger.
"There were no violations [of airspace]," he said. "Our plans flew where they were supposed to."
The general added that the causes of the accident over Lithuania would be identified after a Defense Ministry team had investigated the crash site.
