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Russian crews are scouring the Black Sea for remnants of the American MQ-9 Reaper that crashed there earlier this week, Pentagon officials said, while the U.S. military made public on Thursday raw video footage that seems to show a Russian fighter jet dumping fuel on the drone and clipping its propeller just before it went down.
Even as U.S. military officials tried to keep the focus on Ukraine and its fight against Russian invaders, high-stakes questions about the drone crash remain unanswered, including whether Moscow could potentially get its hands on sensitive data if it finds the wreckage before America or its allies do. Russian personnel on Thursday were reportedly near where the MQ-9 crashed, though Pentagon leaders stressed that the drone likely broke apart upon impact and whatever is left is now at least 4,000 feet underwater, making recovery efforts exceedingly difficult.
Russian officials again blamed the U.S. for the incident and charged that the U.S. is increasingly risking a direct confrontation by flying surveillance drones over the Black Sea near the coast of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed forcibly in 2014 and claims as its own territory.
The back-and-forth between Washington and Moscow nearly overshadowed other key developments Thursday, including Poland’s announcement that it will send a dozen MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine, the first formal offer from a NATO member in the face of multiple pleas from Kyiv.
The Polish offer will put new pressure on the Biden administration to send its own American F-16 planes to Ukraine and deliver what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said would be a potential game-changer in the country’s war effort.
“Victory on the ground is indeed forged in the sky and such an ‘aircraft coalition’ could work according to the principle of the ‘tank coalition’” that is rushing Western tanks to the Ukrainian front lines, a spokesman for Gen. Oleschuk told the news service. NATO-supplied fighter jets would “enable us to seize the airspace over Ukraine as soon as possible and help our ground forces,” the spokesman added.
Separately, a United Nations-backed inquiry released Thursday found that Russian attacks against civilians in Ukraine amounted to war crimes, possibly even crimes against humanity. The panel cited systematic torture and other horrific abuses by Russian troops.
Against that backdrop, Pentagon officials tried to keep the focus squarely on the war itself and on delivering the equipment Ukraine needs to win. They rejected the Kremlin’s assertion that the war is rapidly transforming into a conflict between the U.
