The U.S. military on Thursday morning released dramatic video that it said showed a Russian fighter jet intercepting and then colliding with the American MQ-9 "Reaper" drone that crashed into the Black Sea on Tuesday. The U.S. has accused Russia of operating its warplane in an "unsafe and unprofessional" manner during the encounter near Ukraine's Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula.
On Wednesday, a senior Russian official said Moscow would try to recover the wreckage of the drone. U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters the unmanned aerial vehicle had likely broken during the crash and whatever debris was left likely sank to a depth of thousands of feet in the Black Sea.
"That's U.S. property," Milley said Wednesday at a Pentagon news conference. "There's probably not a lot to recover, frankly."
An official told CBS News that the Russians had reached the site of the crash and would probably manage to collect some pieces of the debris, like metal chunks, but Milley said the U.S. had taken mitigating measures to prevent the loss of any sensitive intelligence.
"We are quite confident that whatever was of value is no longer of value," he told reporters.
The video released Thursday by the Pentagon (above), captured by a camera on the MQ-9, first shows a fighter jet pass by at close range before making another pass during which it allegedly hit the drone's propeller. The camera view is lost briefly after the apparent collision but it comes back to show what the Air Force said was damage to the propeller from the strike.
The Russian jet "dumped fuel upon and struck the propeller of the MQ-9, causing U.S. forces to have to bring the MQ-9 down in international waters," the Air Force said in a statement accompanying the video.
The video released by the U.S. military's European Command was "edited for length, however, the events are depicted in sequential order," the statement said.
The Russian jet "dumped fuel upon and struck the propeller of the MQ-9, causing U.S. forces to have to bring the MQ-9 down in international waters," the Air Force said in a statement accompanying the video.
The video released by the U.S. military's European Command was "edited for length, however, the events are depicted in sequential order," the statement said.
The Russian jet "dumped fuel upon and struck the propeller of the MQ-9, causing U.S. forces to have to bring the MQ-9 down in international waters," the Air Force said in a statement accompanying the video.
The video released by the U.S. military's European Command was "edited for length, however, the events are depicted in sequential order," the statement said.
Russia's Defense Ministry said Shoigu had told Austin that the collision was the result of "increased [U.S.] intelligence activities against the interests of the Russian Federation" and "non-compliance with the restricted flight zone" declared by Moscow amid its ongoing war in Ukraine. Ukraine's southern coast is on the Black Sea, and Crimea, occupied by Russia since 2014 and claimed as its sovereign territory, sticks out into the body of water.
(With inputs from agencies)