US releases video of Russian jet dumping fuel on its drone
A US Air Force MQ-9 drone is approached by a Russian SU-27 aircraft jettisoning fuel over the Black Sea on March 14. AFP
Moscow has confirmed that it will try to find the wreckage of the US military drone that crashed over the Black Sea in the context of a confrontation that Washington blamed on two Russian fighter jets.
Russia warned that it would respond "proportionately" to any US "provocation" in the future, amid rising tensions, while Russia denied that its Su-27 fighter had caused the Reaper's propeller to be cut off.
But US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that he had informed his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu that the United States would continue to fly its planes in international airspace.
Moscow confirmed the call and said it was initiated by Washington.
The Russian Ministry of Defense considered that "the flight of US strategic unmanned aircraft off the coast of Crimea is of a provocative nature, which prepares the atmosphere for an escalation of the situation in the Black Sea region," while Kiev considered that the incident is an attempt by the Kremlin to drag the United States into the conflict in Ukraine.
"I don't know if we will be able to recover it, but it must be done, and we will certainly work in this direction," said the Secretary-General of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, in televised statements.
However, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said in a statement to reporters that it would be difficult to recover the wreckage of the drone, as it was likely to have crumbled and sank in a water area at a depth of between 1,200 and 1,500 meters.
He indicated that the United States had taken precautionary measures to protect sensitive information in the event that Russia managed to recover the wreckage.
"We are confident that what used to be valuable is no longer so," Milley said.
