A Russian Su-25 fighter jet has been downed near the Idlib province in northern Syria, media reports.
Russia entered the Syrian war in 2015 with a series of airstrikes it said targeted Islamic State, a banned terrorist organization in Russia. The Kremlin’s intervention on the side of Syrian President Bashar Assad is widely seen as having turned the tide of the war in favor of the regime.
The Interfax news agency cited a Defense Ministry statement as confirming the incident. The statement said the pilot had successfully ejected but was later killed by militants. Images claiming to show the pilot's corpse widely circulated on social media.
Earlier, several media cited the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group as saying that the pilot had survived the crash and was captured.
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