The state-run news agency quotes a source in the Defense Ministry.
“We fly without armaments,” the source says to RIA Novosti.
Also Interfax quotes a Defense Ministry source on Monday denying the existence of nuclear weapons onboard Russian bombers flying in international airspace.
It was on Sunday the British newspaper The Express quoted unnamed sources in the Ministry of Defense in London claiming one of the two Tu-95 bombers that were flying over the English Channel on Wednesday last week carried a nuclear warhead.
The two Russian bombers were flying in international airspace from the Barents Sea north of Norway on a southbound route towards the North Sea and the English Channel. North of Finnmark Norwegian F-16 fighter jets scrambled from Bodø airbase met the bombers. Outside England the planes turned around a fly back the way they had come.
Information about nuclear weapons and their locations is traditionally kept secret.
Britain has voiced concern that the Russian military planes pose a threat to civilian air traffic since they had not filed a flight plan, did not have their transponders switched on and were not talking to air traffic control.
BBC reports that the Foreign Office in London had a meeting with the Russian Ambassador to discuss the incident. In an earlier statement, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said to the BBC that the United Kingdom was concerned about the “extremely aggressive probing” of its airspace by Russia.
