Russia Said to Begin Emergency Pullout of Embassy Staff in Israel

Russia reportedly began evacuating its embassy staff and their families from Israel on Tuesday, Jan. 6, though Kyiv Post has found little evidence substantiating the report.

The reports originate from flight tracking data and had not been confirmed by official sources, including Russia’s foreign ministry, at the time of publication.

Daily Iran News, a channel on X monitoring Middle East developments, asserted on Wednesday:

“The Russian army is urgently evacuating the staff of the Russian embassy along with their families in Israel and returning them to Russia. This is the third flight by Russia in the past 24 hours to evacuate its embassy in Israel,” it wrote, attaching a screenshot from a flight tracking site ADS-B Exchange.

“There are some news that Russia has been informed of apparently,” it claimed.

Official channels from the Russian Embassy in Israel made no such announcement, nor did Russia’s foreign ministry or major news outlets from Russia or beyond.

Analyzing the flight data

The flight listed has the call sign RWZ016 with the registration RA-64516.

According to another tracking site, Flight Aware, RWZ016 had been making nearly daily flights from Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport to Moscow’s Domodedovo International Airport since at least Dec. 26, with similar scheduled flights on both Thursday and Friday.

Notably, the destination at one point changed to “near Vladikavkaz,” the capital of Russia’s North Ossetia region in the Caucasus Mountains, on Jan. 6.

Other Topics of Interest

Lukashenko: ‘No Military Action Should Be Expected From Belarus’

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko said Belarus will not enter Russia’s war against Ukraine, citing Belarus’ military vulnerability, the risk of widening the front line and drawing in NATO, as well as underlining deep family ties across the Belarus-Ukraine border as key reasons. Lukashenko has issued a rare apology to President Volodymyr Zelensky, admitting he “maybe went too far” in earlier criticism.

The site said the plane is operated by Red Wings Airlines, a leisure airline based in Domodedovo. A ticket on Jan. 9 departing at 11:55 p.m. local time, whose flight time matches those shown in the flight history of RWZ016, is available for 44,959 rubles ($558) on its site – rendering the assertion that it is an official evacuation flight unlikely.

Why all the fuss?

What matters is the registration – RA-64516.

Some tracking site, such as FlightRadar24, lists RA-64516 as belonging to a Tupolev Tu-214SR operated by the Russian military’s Special Flight Detachment. Some even liken it to Russia’s “Doomsday jet,” though it is likely used for communications relay.

Yet for one reason or another, the same number is also used for Red Wings flights, alongside RA-64518.

Flight Aware lists both RA-64516 and RA-64518 as Tu-204 jetliners operated by Red Wings Airlines. Of note is how the flight history of both flights never overlapped, with a potential explanation: human error.

Reports of military flight RA-64516 occasionally show up on the internet – but in August 2025, a report by Global Fact-Checking noted that the pilot likely entered the flight number incorrectly, as in previous reports of RA-64516 flying between Tel Aviv and Moscow.

“A transponder is a device on board an aircraft that transmits flight number, altitude, speed, and route data to flight tracking systems (such as Flightradar24). Pilots or crew sometimes manually enter data into the transponder, and typos may occur in this process,” wrote Timofey V, the report’s author.

“Most likely, this is exactly what happened: When setting up the transponder, the Red Wings crew accidentally entered RA-64516 instead of RA-64518. Because of this single figure, the entire flight was mistakenly identified as a Russian military aircraft,” he added.

Kyiv Post cannot verify whether that was indeed the case, given that RA-64516 was regularly registered over the past week – which would mean either a very careless pilot or a very intentional typo. But circumstantial evidence pointed to no evacuation flights for the Russian embassy in Israel.