Instead, it’s more like they are carrying fake passports issued by the Russian Federation. But, one likely would not get caught traveling on a fake passport issued by their country’s government’s spy service, unless they had already travelled on another (perhaps legit) passport abroad (Russia has internal passports too) that has fingerprint information in combination with a photo of the individual. This drastically reduces false negatives when things like this need to be flagged.
My US passport only contains a photo as biometric information, while my European Union passport contains fingerprints and my photo as biometric information.
Maria Zakharova even wrote that “It is shocking that the West calls the incident in Belarusian airspace ‘shocking,’”.
She is the Director of the Press Department for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and is famous for claiming things as ludicrous as this one…
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/konstantinbenyumov/mari...
No? Why would that be the case?