U.S., Russia tensions escalate over drone
KYIV, Ukraine — Russia and the United States ratcheted up their confrontational rhetoric Wednesday over a U.S. surveillance drone that encountered Russian warplanes and crashed near Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which the Kremlin has illegally annexed. At the same time, the two countries' defense chiefs opened a dialogue about the incident.
The Kremlin said the flight proved again that Washington is directly involved in the fighting and added that Moscow would try to recover the drone's wreckage from the Black Sea. U.S. officials said the incident showed Russia's aggressive and risky behavior and pledged to continue their surveillance.
Russia has long voiced concern about U.S. surveillance flights near its borders, but Tuesday's incident signaled Moscow's increasing readiness to raise the ante as tensions soar between the two nuclear powers. It reflected the Kremlin's appetite for brinkmanship that could further destabilize the situation and lead to more direct confrontations.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who said the incident was part of a “pattern of aggressive, risky and unsafe actions by Russian pilots in international airspace,” spoke to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, on Wednesday for the first time in five months.
“It's important that great powers be models of transparency and communication, and the United States will continue to fly and to operate wherever international law allows,” Austin told reporters.
Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who also appeared at the briefing, said, “We know that the intercept was intentional. We know that the aggressive behavior was intentional,” but whether the collision itself was intentional was still unclear.
Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia's Security Council, said in televised remarks the drone incident was “another confirmation” of direct U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict. The Kremlin has repeatedly said the United States and other NATO members have become direct war participants by supplying weapons and intelligence to the Kyiv government and pressuring it not to negotiate peace.
Patrushev, a confidant of President Vladimir Putin, also said Russia would search for the drone's debris, but added, “I don't know if we can recover them or not, but we will certainly have to do that, and we will deal with it.”
U.S. officials said Russia dispatched ships to try to recover the wreckage, which Milley said were 4,000 to 5,000 feet deep.
The U.S. has no vessels in the Black Sea to recover the drone because Turkey closed the Bosphorus Strait to warships in 2022, except for those returning to home port.
U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the MQ-9 Reaper drone was in international airspace when a Russian fighter jet struck its propeller. U.S. officials accused Russia of trying to intercept the unmanned aerial vehicle, although its presence over the Black Sea — a strategic military and economic area for both Russia and Ukraine — was not uncommon.
Kirby said the U.S. “took steps to protect the information and to protect, to minimize any effort by anybody else to exploit that drone for useful content.”
The secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, tweeted the drone incident was “a signal from Putin that he is ready to expand the conflict zone, with drawing other parties in.”