After a confrontation between two Russian fighters and a US drone over the Black Sea, after which US forces shot down the drone in the Black Sea, a Russian security official said that Russia wants to recover the fragments of the US reconnaissance drone.

Edited by| Christian Megan

 World  section -  CJ journalist

KYIV, Ukraine -15 March 2023      

Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, claimed in televised remarks that Tuesday’s incident was “another confirmation” of direct U.S. involvement in the conflict in Ukraine. He said Russia planned to search for the drone’s debris.

“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,” Patrushev said. “I certainly hope for success.”

U.S. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the drone was flying in international airspace and over international waters when a Russian fighter jet struck the propeller of the MQ-Reaper drone.

U.S. officials accused Russia of attempting to intercept the unmanned aerial vehicle, although its presence over the Black Sea was not an uncommon occurrence.

“It is also not uncommon for the Russians to try to intercept them,” Kirby said, adding that such an encounter “does increase the risk of miscalculations, misunderstandings.”

Kirby said the drone had not yet been recovered and it was unclear whether it would be, but 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.”

“It is also not uncommon for the Russians to try to intercept them,” Kirby said, adding that such an encounter “does increase the risk of miscalculations, misunderstandings.”

Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said Russia has the technological capability to recover the drone’s fragments from deep in the Black Sea.

Earlier Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated the Russian Defense Ministry’s statement that Russian jets didn’t use their weapons or impact the U.S. drone.

Peskov described U.S.-Russia relations as being at their lowest point but added that “Russia has never rejected a constructive dialogue, and it’s not rejecting it now.”

At the Pentagon, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the intercept by the Russian jet was part of a “pattern of aggressive, risky, and unsafe actions by Russian pilots in international airspace.” He said Russia must operate its aircraft in a safe manner.

“Make no mistake, the United States will continue to fly and to operate wherever international law allows,” Austin said in opening remarks before a virtual meeting of a U.S.-led effort to coordinate Western military support for Ukraine.

While encounters between Russian and NATO aircraft are not unusual — before the invasion of Ukraine, NATO planes were involved in an annual average of 400 intercepts with Russian planes — the war has heightened the significance and potential hazards of such incidents.

“The last thing that we want, certainly the last thing that anybody should want, is for this war in Ukraine to escalate to become something between the United States and Russia, to have this actually ... expand beyond that,” Kirby said,

The secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, tweeted Wednesday that the drone incident was “a signal from (Russian President Vladimir) Putin that he is ready to expand the conflict zone, withdrawing other parties in.”

Separately, the U.K. defense ministry said British and German air force fighter jets were scrambled Tuesday to intercept a Russian aircraft flying close to Estonian airspace. The U.K. and Germany are conducting joint air policing missions in Estonia as part of NATO’s bolstering of its eastern flank.

The defense ministry said the Typhoon jets responded after a Russian air-to-air refueling aircraft failed to communicate with Estonian air traffic control. The Russian plane did not enter the airspace of Estonia, a NATO member.

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