You want to know why Russia's playing coy over the missile thing?

Flying along the edge of the airspace of another country is fairly standard practice in the Nation State game. What you're attempting to do is to get the other team to light you up with their radar so that you can get fixes on the locations and types of their air-defense radar tracking sites. If you're really lucky, a missile battery might decide to track you.

If you're a really big power trying to intimidate a weedy little breakaway former possession, you may even penetrate their airspace in an attempt to get them to power up everything they have before you zip homeward safely. What are they going to do? Risk a war they'd certainly lose by shooting at a plane that had only "gotten lost"?

Suppose something goes wrong, though. Suppose that Threat Warning Receiver warbles really loud and convincing-like. Suppose your pilot panics when he thinks he's being launched on. Or, alternatively, suppose he's getting in a bit of practice of his own with acquiring targets for his Anti-Radiation Missiles and accidentally pickles one off...

...and it not only doesn't hit the target, it doesn't explode either.

Now you don't look like a big, scary intimidating power in the incident. In fact, the affair makes you look a bit buffoonish. Hell yes, you'd be denying involvement. I know I would. I'd lie. I'd fling wild counter-accusations. Then when finally cornered on it months from now, I could claim that the rogue pilot was acting alone and had been re-assigned to mail flights in Siberia.