Washington.- Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said Wednesday that the United States will continue to conduct surveillance flights after a US reconnaissance plane was attacked by a Russian fighter jet and shot down over the Black Sea.
“Make no mistake, the United States will continue to fly and operate where international law allows,” Austin said in remarks at the start of a virtual gathering of some 50 nations supporting Ukraine’s war efforts against Russia.
“This dangerous episode is part of a pattern of aggressive, risky and unsafe actions by Russian pilots in international airspace,” Austin said. “It is incumbent on Russia to operate its military aircraft in a safe and professional manner.”
The incident, the first known physical contact between the Russian and US militaries since the war in Ukraine began, has heightened tensions between the superpowers, with both sides blaming each other. The United States and Ukraine have said that the unarmed US MQ-9 Reaper drone was flying in international airspace on a routine surveillance and reconnaissance mission. US and Ukrainian officials have said they share intelligence collected by such missions, particularly regarding the threat posed by Russian warships and submarines in the Black Sea.
Russia denied that its plane crashed into the drone and demanded an end to US military flights near Russian territory. The Pentagon accused Moscow of recklessness, saying Russian planes dropped fuel on the US drone on Tuesday before one of them severed the drone’s propeller and caused its US operators to shoot it down in the Black Sea, southwest of the peninsula. Russian-occupied Crimea.
“The unacceptable actions of the United States military in the vicinity of our borders are cause for concern,” Anatoly Antonov, the Russian ambassador to the United States, was quoted as saying by Tass, a Russian state media outlet.
Antonov, who was summoned to the State Department to receive a formal US objection to the downing of the drone, added that “we perceive any action involving the use of US military weapons and equipment as openly hostile.”
“The Black Sea is not Russia’s internal sea,” Yurii Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, said in an appearance on national television. Romania and Turkey, both NATO members, have ports on the Black Sea.
Ihnat said he wanted to let US officials comment on the details of the incident, but that it fit a pattern of Russian aggression.
The Pentagon said the incident was an example of Russian incompetence. US officials said they did not believe the Russians had intended to engage the drone’s propeller with their plane, a risky move that also endangered the Russian plane.
“This incident demonstrates a lack of competence as well as being unsafe and unprofessional,” the US Army’s European Command said in a statement.
John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said the incident was “notable for how unsafe and unprofessional it was.”
Other US officials said they had seen no indication that what happened heralded a broader strategy of harassing US or NATO reconnaissance planes, and one official said it was not some kind of “concerted chess move.” by Russia.
