Russia said on Wednesday it wanted to recover fragments of a US surveillance drone that US troops shot down in the Black Sea on Tuesday after colliding with a Russian fighter jet.
Russian Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev said the incident was “further confirmation” of direct US involvement in the conflict in Ukraine after Moscow accused the US air force of staging a “provocative action” with its unmanned aerial vehicle. aeroplane.
“I don’t know if we can recover [o ‘drone’], but we will certainly try. I hope we succeed”said Patrushev.
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the drone was flying in international airspace and over international waters when a Russian fighter jet hit the drone’s propeller, forcing the Air Force to shoot it down.
US authorities accused Russia of trying to intercept the ‘drone’, in a maneuver they called ‘unprofessional’
Kirby said the equipment has yet to be recovered and that the US has taken “steps to protect the information and minimize any effort to exploit this ‘drone’ for useful content.”
Serguei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s external intelligence services, said Russia has the technological capacity to retrieve the “drone” fragments from the depths of the Black Sea.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov this morning echoed the statement by the Russian Defense Ministry that the Russian jets did not use weapons or collide with the US drone, contrary to the Pentagon’s version.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin defended the version that the interception by the Russian jetliner is part of a “pattern of aggressive, risky and unsafe actions by Russian pilots in international airspace”.
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, wrote on his Twitter account today that the ‘drone’ incident was “a sign of [Vladimir] Putin [Presidente russo] that it is preparing to expand the conflict area”.
However, the British Ministry of Defense said British and German fighter jets were deployed on Tuesday to intercept a Russian aircraft flying close to Estonian airspace.
The United Kingdom and Germany are conducting joint air policing missions in Estonia as part of NATO reinforcement operations in the east.
Source: DN
