Mighta been the safe thing to do. Land on water. It’s softer and won’t blow the plane up. Reminds me of the movie “None But the Brave”. A DC-3 carrying marines crash landed on a beach. They hit the water first. Then the beach.
Ok so it was Russians that shot them down and Russians who jammed the radio. Might saved them.
The Russians didn’t skit for them! The Russians wanted to hide the bodies and announce a plane crashed into the sea and was too difficult to recover.
All they wanted to do was hide the evidence. If they were jamming the GPS they did not do it out of love.
I find the “GPS spoofing” claim dubious. Easy to jam, a lot harder to spoof, and military signals are probably impossible to spoof in practice, and if they had that capability why reveal it in a penny ante confrontation? Wait for the big show.