When Roy MacIntyre joined the RAF in 1982 there was always “them” out there — them being the Soviets. Even the Falklands war didn’t stop training for the third world war, to be fought against the Red Army and its allies. Four years later, when MacIntyre started flying Phantom fighters, the divide between Nato and the Warsaw Pact seemed vast and unbridgeable.

So when earlier this month an RAF Hercules transport carried him from his base at Leuchars directly to Siauliai in Lithuania, a former Soviet airbase, without any fighter escort, he was not at all comfortable.

“It’s like I shouldn’t really be here,” said MacIntyre a few hours after landing. “It just doesn’t seem right, not after half a career chasing Russians around the sky. I once flew to Australia over Russia and that didn’t seem right either.”

The Stirling-born flight lieutenant is not a visitor to Siauliai. In a strategic initiative that has extended Nato’s boundaries dramatically eastwards since last March, he is now one of the base’s principal protectors, part of a detachment from 43 Squadron and defender of Lithuania and the other two Baltic states, Estonia and Latvia. His RAF unit represents the first substantial Nato presence in the former Soviet republic.

No longer is the Kremlin buffered from perceived enemies in the West by puppet states; the Russian border is close by and this airbase is barely 150 miles from St Petersburg.

The RAF Tornado F3 MacIntyre flies is one of only four fighters policing Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia until they are relieved by other RAF units in January.

But his essential “problem”, he admits, is that his training and early flying experience has been conditioned by preparing to combat the Soviet MiG-29 and Su-27 combat planes that used to fly out of this cold, windswept airfield.

“We used to scramble at least once a week, often coming up to meet Soviet Bears (long-range reconnaissance planes) over the Shetlands,” he recalls. “It was very civilised, though; their crews used to flash Coke bottles and Playboy magazines at us.”

But if some of the RAF officers find it hard to come to terms with this manifestation of the new world order, their Lithuanian counterparts are more relaxed.

The base’s Lithuanian chief of staff is Major Arturas Balynas, a former fighter pilot in the Soviet air force. “I used to fly MiG-21s and Su-27s and think what it would be like to go up against Nato F16s and Tornadoes,” he says.

“Now I work with them. As an airman, I can say there is not a very big difference between Nato and the Warsaw Pact.” And with that Balynas offers an internationally recognised gesture — a shrug.

At 47, MacIntyre is the oldest fighter pilot in the RAF, and married with two children. He expects to see out his flying career on Tornado F3s. The likelihood on this assignment, however, is that he won’t face a dogfight with a Russian jet.

Indeed, the only Russian combat plane in sight is a MiG-21 “gate guardian”, sited at this base to serve as a reminder that Siauliai used to be a frontline Soviet station and once perceived as an important target for counter-attacking US Marines.

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