U.S. fighter jets intercepted six Russian aircraft flying off Alaska’s coasts again last week, and accompanied them as they passed through the international airspace.

More than 10,000 U.S. service members have launched Northern Edge 2023, Alaska’s biggest military training exercise of the year.

Army officials have identified the three soldiers who died Thursday after the two helicopters they were flying collided in mid-air near Healy. And experts arrived over the weekend to begin investigating cause of Thursday's fatal crash.

A long-running effort to develop a National Veterans Cemetery near Fairbanks may finally come to fruition. Two previous attempts to site a vets cemetery near Fox and Ester failed, due to permafrost and contamination issues. But a new proposal to locate one in Salcha appears to be on track. If funding is secured, construction could begin next year.

The Army has sent 90 Stryker vehicles from Fort Wainwright to Ukraine to help the nation defend itself. But the fort still has a few Strykers around to help soldiers train to defend against attack with weapons of mass destruction.

The state Division of Forestry has cleared a wide swath of trees and vegetation from a fire-prone area west of Delta Junction. It’s one of several fuel breaks that Forestry has cleared over the past year to protect other communities around the state from wildfire.

The big Army training exercise that got under way this week near Fairbanks demonstrates how the service is reorienting its Alaska-based force from one that frequently deploys to far-flung hotspots overseas to one that lives and operates in the Arctic and around the Pacific.

The federal Bureau of Land Management is asking for public comment on the Army’s request to keep using 870,000 acres of public land around Fort Wainwright and Fort Greely for military training areas. The BLM has scheduled two public meetings next month to talk about the Army land withdrawals.

The Alaska-based 11th Airborne Division will host its first large-scale training exercise next week on ranges around Fort Wainwright and Eielson Air Force Base. That means more than 500 Army vehicles that’ll take part in the exercise will be traveling on the Parks Highway and the northernmost stretch of the Richardson Highway over the next couple of weeks.

Updated: F-22 jet fighters out of Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson shot down an airborne object this morning off the northern coast of Alaska. Military personnel are now working to recover debris from the object that fell onto some pack ice in an area of the Beaufort Sea.