Used to be common when the USSR was still intact. They buzzed us plenty of times in the North Atlantic.
I was out on deck on board the USS Harlan R. Dickson (DD-708) off the coast off Norway one fine spring day in 1968 when a Russian Bear bomber buzzed us.
The guy standing watch on the after deck gave us a "heads up" that a Russian bomber was headed our way, and about a minute later, one did. Flew over pretty close, then kept on going.
A few minutes later the watch told us he just got a message that the bomber had crashed, and we had to divert course and go search for any survivors.
A couple of days later we pulled into Bergen, Norway, where I saw an English language newspaper describing the incident, and talking about the rumor circulating that the plane might have been shot down by a US warship.
That was us. Nothing ever came of it, but what can I say - Cold War Follies.
That’s correct. In those day, as long as there was no indication of a fire control system lock. We tracked them, but we never locked fire control on them. It was sorta the un-written rule in those day. No fire control lock, no foul. Otherwise birds free, something the Soviet pilots understood.