Washington's top general has said the crash of a US surveillance drone after being intercepted by Russian jets showed Moscow's "increasingly aggressive" behaviour, while Russia has warned the United States that flying drones near Crimea risks escalation.
A day after the US drone went down over the Black Sea on Tuesday, defence ministers and military chiefs from the US and Russia held rare telephone conversations, with relations at their lowest point in decades over Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.
Moscow's defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, told his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, that American drone flights by Crimea's coast "were provocative in nature" and could lead to "an escalation … in the Black Sea zone", a ministry statement said.
Crimea is a peninsula that was part of Ukraine until Moscow annexed it by force in 2014.
Russia, the statement added, "had no interest in such a development but will in future react in due proportion" and the two countries should "act with a maximum of responsibility", including by having military lines of communication in a crisis.
Mr Austin declined to offer any details of the call — including whether he criticised the Russian intercept.
But he reiterated at a news conference that the US intended to continue flying where international law allowed and demanded Russian military aircraft operate in a safe and professional manner.
Mr Austin appeared before reporters at the Pentagon alongside General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had a separate call with Russia's Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.
Earlier, Russian authorities said that they will try to recover the fragments of a US surveillance drone that crashed into the Black Sea after an encounter with Russian fighter jets.
On Tuesday, US Air Force General James Hecker called the incident — in which the US said a Russian SU-27 fighter plane clipped the propeller of one of its Reaper drones before it crashed — an "unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians".
Russia denied hitting the drone, suggesting it had crashed due to "sharp manoeuvring".
Kremlin Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev said Russia would "have to" begin work on a recovery effort.
"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," Mr Patrushev said.
"I certainly hope for success."
However, White House spokesman John Kirby said the MQ-9 surveillance drone might never be recovered, given the depth of the Black Sea where it went down.
"I'm not sure that we're going to be able to recover it," Mr Kirby said.
"Where it fell into the Black Sea — [it's] very, very deep water. So we're still assessing whether there can be any kind of recovery effort. There may not be."
General Milley told reporters at a press briefing that it was likely that the drone broke apart upon impact in the Black Sea, in 1,219-1,524 metres of water, and would be difficult to recover.
"There's probably not a lot to recover, frankly, as far as the loss of anything of sensitive intelligence, etcetera. As normal, we would take, and we did take, mitigating measures," General Milley said.
"So we are quite confident that whatever was of value is no longer of value."
Relations with US in 'lamentable state'
General Milley said that the downing of the US drone was part of a pattern of military behaviour by Russia, which was becoming more aggressive.
"There is a pattern of behaviour recently where there is a little bit more aggressive actions being conducted by the Russians," he said.
"We think we haven't completed our analysis as to why that's happening. And it wasn't just involving us. There were some incidents earlier with the British and some of the other nations as well."
While Washington remained firm on the issue, the Kremlin also did, and maintained its stance that the incident was the fault of the US, but said that, despite worsening relations, it was open to dialogue with the United States.
Mr Patrushev said that the drone's presence over the Black Sea was "the latest confirmation" that the US was "directly participating" in the war in Ukraine.
Sergei Naryshkin — head of Russia's SVR foreign intelligence service — told Russian reporter Pavel Zarubin that the United States was "very active" in space, visual and radio reconnaissance in the region.
"We have a detailed knowledge and understanding of the intelligence aims of the United States using technological means, and we try to identify the objects that are of greatest interest to them," he said in a video posted online.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there had been no high-level contact with Washington and that bilateral relations were "at their lowest point, in a very lamentable state" but that, "at the same time, Russia has never refused constructive dialogue, and is not refusing now".
Ukraine says more incidents 'inevitable'
As the United States warned Russia it needs to be more careful with its military aircraft, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said he expected there would be more incidents like the one that saw a US Reaper surveillance drone crash into the Black Sea.
Speaking to the BBC, Mr Kuleba described the incident as "routine".
He also said it was his belief this type of incident would continue to occur as long as Russia controlled Crimea, which the Kremlin illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
"As long as Russia controls Crimea, these kinds of incidents will be inevitable and the Black Sea will not be a safe place," Mr Kuleba told the BBC.
"So the only way to prevent such incidents is actually to kick Russia out of Crimea."
His comments came after Mr Kirby told CNN that US officials had told Russian ambassador Anatoly Antonov that Russia needed to show more caution.
"The last thing that we want — certainly the last thing that anybody should want — is for this war in Ukraine to escalate to become something between the United States and Russia, to have this actually … expand beyond that," Mr Kirby said.
"The message that we delivered to the Russian ambassador is that they need to be more careful in flying in international airspace near US assets that are, again, flying in completely legal ways, conducting missions in support of our national security interests," Mr Kirby said.
"They're the ones that need to be more careful."
Mr Antonov was later reported to have told Russia's TASS news agency that Russia would "no longer allow anybody to violate our waters".
The Black Sea is not a waterway claimed by any one country.
Asked by the BBC if he thought the incident might make Ukraine's allies more cautious about operations in the area, Mr Kuleba said he believed that would be a mistake.
"If the West wants to demonstrate its weakness, it should certainly demonstrate its cautiousness after an incident like this, but I don't have a feeling that this is the mood in capitals," he replied.
"The mood is not to escalate, but nor is the mood to lean under the pressure … of Russia."
NATO jets intercept Russian plane
The Black Sea drone incident occurred on the same day as a pair of UK and German jets intercepted a Russian plane that strayed too close to Estonian airspace.
Two Typhoon fighter jets were scrambled to escort a Russian Ilyushin Il-78 Midas air-to-air refuelling tanker after it failed to signal its intentions to Estonian air traffic control, according to a statement from the UK government.
The tanker had been travelling between St Petersburg and Kaliningrad, the administrative centre of the Russian semi-exclave Kaliningrad Oblast, which sits on the Baltic Sea in northern Europe.
The escort mission was a routine operation, but it marked the first time jets from the British and German air forces had conducted such a mission together, the UK government said.
Four RAF Typhoon jets are currently based in Estonia as part of a long-established joint NATO air policing mission, the BBC reports.
The RAF is preparing to take over the operation from the German Air Force in April and, until then, the countries are conducting joint operations.
Wing Commander Scott Maccoll — the commander of the RAF's 140 Expeditionary Air Wing, which took part in the operation — said it was "great to see the UK and German elements operate as one team".
"As NATO continually adapts its structures and workforce, today shows us the next evolution," he said.
ABC/Reuters
