Ukraine Secretly Tried to Get 3 Russian Pilots to Defect

“At first, the Russian pilots all thought it was a scam. But they agreed to go along with it anyway, especially after the initial payments came through,” Yahoo News reports.

“Last summer, a group of Ukrainian volunteers, working closely with their country’s intelligence service, apparently came close to persuading three Russian aviators who were in the midst of bombing Ukraine to defect with their warplanes in exchange for $1 million a piece.”

“What looked like a legitimate plan to switch sides proved anything but. None of the pilots defected in the end. There is strong evidence that most if not all of them were found out by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), one of the successor agencies to the Soviet KGB.”