Plane Full of Russians Makes Emergency Landing in Estonia After Drone Attack in St Petersburg

An Estonian media outlet, Postimees, reported that a plane full of Russian tourists bound for St Petersburg made an emergency landing in Tallinn on Sunday morning.

The flight from Egypt was scheduled to land at Pulkovo Airport, in Russia’s second-largest city, which was closed following an overnight Ukrainian drone attack that damaged several sites on Russian territory.

Those attacks hit Russian targets including the port of Ust-Luga and areas near the Kursk nuclear power plant close to the Ukrainian border.

The plane, operated by Egypt’s AlMarsia Universal Airlines, landed in Tallinn at 5:33 a.m. local time, citing Margot Holts, Head of Communications and Marketing at Tallinn Airport.

“The aircraft was diverted to Tallinn because it was unable to land at Pulkovo due to a temporary closure,” she said.

Once Pulkovo was re-opened, the aircraft departed Tallinn at 11:08 a.m. bound for their intended destination.

During their five-and-a-half-hour layover, the passengers, reportedly all Russian tourists, and the plane’s crew were not permitted to leave the aircraft while on Estonian soil.

Estonia, once a Soviet republic and now a member of the European Union and NATO, both since 2004, has been one of Kyiv’s boldest supporters and one of the West’s biggest spenders-per-capita on defense.

Estonia is set to spend a whopping 5.4 percent of its GDP on defense this year, amounting to $3.2 billion in a country of just 1.4 million people.

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Talinn is only about 300km (180 miles) from St. Petersburg as a plane flies.

Ukrainska Pravda reported that the scene on the tarmac on Sunday was similar to a situation in February of this year, when a Russian plane flying from Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to Kaliningrad was forced to make an emergency landing in Poznań, Poland, due to adverse weather conditions, after Warsaw Airport refused it permission to land. 

In that case, Russian media reported, passengers were not allowed to disembark or to eat or drink. The plane left Poznań the following morning.