NATO recon planes far more capable than the F-22 (RC-135s, for example; https://news.yahoo.com/russian-fighter-jet-fired-off-1432464...) are flying regularly over the Black Sea already.

No one needs an F-22 to guide missiles to a known airbase. It doesn’t move; GPS will hit the targets you can clearly see on Google Maps to within feet of where you want.

> Russia is already saying it’s in a limited war with NATO.

Sure. They also said they didn’t have troops in Crimea, and that they weren’t planning an invasion of Ukraine. It’s a weak attempt at explaining their poor performance.

That would be silly, we have planes that are specialized for SIGINT gathering, the F-22 is not one of them. We certainly have SIGINT aircraft operating near Ukraine, but they aren’t F-22s.

> helping guide in missles.

That’s not SIGINT, but something like an airborne forward observer for artillery/missiles. Which is less improbable than SIGINT, but still…

> Such as this attack

Ukraine has attacked airbases much farther from its current lines of control, deep inside Russia proper, with Soviet-era drones converted to loitering munitions. It is far more likely that they did the same thing in Crimea than that they conducted some kind of long range attack with F-22’s providing terminal targeting for some kind of SARH/SALH missile.

Even more likely than even that is that they used the Ukraine-developed-and-manufactured Neptune anti-ship cruise missile (the same reported to have been used against the Russian Black Sea fleet flagship), that has inertial/GPS guidance for land attack, and sufficient range to have hit that base from well within Ukraine-controlled territory at that time.

A german politician said they are at war and since then Berlin "has repeatedly stressed that it wants to avoid the NATO alliance becoming a party to the conflict."

This is a stretch.

The only “rockets” Ukraine has that would reach that range are Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles which has active radar homing for hitting ships, and backup inertial/GPS guidance (which is all that is needed for stationary land targets), and converted Soviet-era drones with (apparently) GPS/inertial guidance it has used for long-range strikes into Russia (specifically, at strategic bomber bases being used for attacks against Ukraine.)

For the F-22 to guide a missile in, it would have to have semi-active radar or laser homing (I believe the F-22 can, with the right equipment, designated for either), but the Neptune doesn’t, and we have no indication that their drone conversions do, either. So, the alternatives for a Ukrainian rocket attack is a weapon we don’t know they have with an assist from fighters that haven’t been reported in the region and that would be the exact kind of escalation the US government is trying to avoid, or weapons we do know they have, which need no US assist.

Which seems likelier?

Resisting a crass joke here as well