US, Russia ratchet up rhetoric over downing of drone

KYIV (AP):

Russia and the United States ratcheted up their confrontational rhetoric Wednesday over a US surveillance drone that encountered Russian warplanes and crashed near Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which the Kremlin has illegally annexed. At the same time, both countries pledged to try to avoid escalation.

The Kremlin said the incident 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. US officials said the incident showed Russia’s aggressive and risky behaviour and pledged to continue their surveillance.

Russia has long voiced concern about US surveillance flights near its borders, but Tuesday’s incident signalled 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.

Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said in televised remarks the drone incident was “another confirmation” of direct US 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 planned to search for the drone’s debris. A US official said it was unclear whether Washington would recover the fragments, presumed to be in deep water, after securing the information the drone had gathered.

“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.

US officials said Russia has dispatched ships to try to recover the wreckage.

The US has no vessels in the Black Sea to recover the drone because Turkey shut the Bosphorus Strait to warships in 2022, except for those returning to home port.

US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said the MQ-9 Reaper drone was in international airspace when a Russian fighter jet struck its propeller. US 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.

“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 US “took steps to protect the information and to protect, to minimise any effort by anybody else to exploit that drone for useful content”.

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

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated the Defence Ministry’s statement that Russian jets didn’t use their weapons or impact the US drone. He repeated his description of US-Russia relations as at their lowest point but added that “Russia has never rejected a constructive dialogue, and it’s not rejecting it now.”

Signs of a dialogue emerged immediately. The defence heads of both countries – Lloyd Austin of the United States and Sergei Shoigu of Russia – spoke by phone Wednesday, Russia’s Defence Ministry reported on social media, without stating the topic.

In another tussle, the UK Defence Ministry said British and German air force fighter jets were scrambled Tuesday to intercept a Russian aircraft near Estonian airspace. The UK and Germany are conducting joint air policing missions in Estonia as part of NATO’s bolstering of its eastern flank.