Viktor Belenko, the former Soviet Air Defence Forces pilot who defected to the West in 1976 in a MiG-25 high-speed interceptor, has passed away on Sep. 24, 2023 Alert 5 first noted. He died in a nursing home in a small town in Southern Illinois on Sep. 24. However, journalists learned about his death only now. The New York Times quoted Belenko’s son, Paul Schmidt, on Nov. 20 as saying that his father had died after a brief, unspecified illness in a nursing home in Rosebud, Illinois. Viktor Belenko was born into a simple family of Soviet workers on Feb....