US, Russia ratchet up rhetoric over downing of 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 Washington is directly involved in the fighting in Ukraine and added 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 in Washington.

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 Russian warplane's collision with the MQ-9 Reaper drone was intentional was still unclear.

The Russian Defense Ministry said in its report of the call with Austin that Shoigu noted the U.S. had provoked the incident by ignoring flight restrictions the Kremlin had imposed because of its military operation in Ukraine and also blamed "the intensification of intelligence activities against the interests of the Russian Federation." Such U.S. actions "are fraught with escalation of the situation in the Black Sea area," it said, warning Russia "will respond in kind to all provocations."

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."

U.S. officials said Russia dispatched ships to try to recover the wreckage, which Milley said were likely submerged 4,000 to 5,000 feet deep.

The U.S. has no vessels in the Black Sea because Turkey closed the Bosphorus Strait to warships in 2022, except for those returning to home port.

U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the drone was in international airspace when the Russian warplane struck its propeller. U.S. officials accused Russia of trying to intercept the unmanned aircraft, 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 such an encounter "does increase the risk of miscalculations, misunderstandings."

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."

Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, said Russia is capable of recovering the wreckage.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated the Defense Ministry's statement that Russian jets didn't use their weapons or hit the drone. He repeated his description of U.S.-Russia relations as at their lowest point but added "Russia has never rejected a constructive dialogue, and it's not rejecting it now."

In Washington, Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov expressed concern about "the unacceptable actions of the United States military in the close proximity to our borders."

"What do they do thousands of miles away from the United States?" he said in remarks his embassy released. "The answer is obvious -- they gather intelligence which is later used by the Kyiv regime to attack our armed forces and territory."

He noted "it is important that the lines of communication should remain open," emphasizing "Russia does not seek confrontation and stands for pragmatic cooperation in the interests of the peoples of our countries."

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

"The last thing that anybody should want is for this war in Ukraine to escalate to become something between the United States and Russia," Kirby said, speaking Wednesday on CNN. "We've been working very, very hard throughout the beginning of this conflict ... to make sure that it doesn't escalate."

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."