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Russian jet-U.S. drone collision: Moscow will try to retrieve drone wreckage in Black Sea after Pentagon blames Russia for crash
Moscow will work to retrieve the wreckage of an American drone that crashed into the Black Sea after Washington said a Russian fighter jet collided with it, a top official said Wednesday.
“I don’t know whether we’ll be able to retrieve it or not but it has to be done. And we will certainly work on it,” Russian Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev said in televised remarks.
“I am hoping for success, of course.”
The head of Russia’s SVR intelligence service, Sergei Naryshkin, said the country has “technical” capabilities to retrieve the drone.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby has said the U.S. was trying to prevent the fallen drone from getting into the wrong hands.
“We’ve taken steps to protect our equities with respect to that particular drone — that particular aircraft,” Kirby told CNN.
But he also said the drone crashed into “very, very deep water.”
“We’re still assessing whether there can be any recovery effort mounted. There may not be,” Kirby said.
Meanwhile, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called for Moscow to operate its aircraft safely and professionally, saying the collision is part of a pattern of “risky” actions. And Moscow warned against “hostile” U.S. flights as tensions simmered between the two countries.
“This hazardous episode is a part of a pattern of aggressive, risky and unsafe actions by Russian pilots in international airspace,” Austin said at the start of a meeting of countries supporting Ukraine’s fight against invading Russian forces.
“Make no mistake, the United States will continue to fly and to operate wherever international law allows. And it is incumbent upon Russia to operate its military aircraft in a safe and professional manner,” he added.
Though Russia has denied its Su-27 plane clipped the propeller of the unmanned drone, Kyiv said the incident over international waters was a Kremlin attempt to widen the Ukraine conflict.
The crash on Tuesday added fresh tensions between Moscow and Western allies.
“We assume that the United States will refrain from further speculation in the media and stop flights near Russian borders,” Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, said Wednesday.
“We consider any action with the use of U.S. weaponry as openly hostile,” he wrote on social media channel Telegram.
Russia’s defense ministry said Tuesday it scrambled fighter jets following the detection of a U.S. drone over the Black Sea and denied causing the crash.
The Pentagon said its drone was on a routine mission when it was intercepted “in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner,” while Russia countered the aircraft was out of control and said its jets had no contact with it.
“Obviously, we refute the Russians’ denial,” Kirby said.
The incident happened 75 miles southwest of the Crimean Peninsula, a part of Ukraine seized by Russia, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports.
For more than half an hour Tuesday morning, two Russian jets made a total of 19 passes on the drone, popping up in front of it to blast it with their jet exhaust and trying to drench it with their fuel.
One of the jets approached from the rear, and U.S. officials believe the pilot meant to come up in front of the drone so it would fly into the fuel cloud — but pulled up too soon and clipped the drone’s propeller, which is located in the back, Martin reports.
“Just bad piloting,” one official said, according to Martin.
Russian intercepts over the Black Sea are common, Kirby said in Washington, but this one “is noteworthy because of how unsafe and unprofessional it was, indeed reckless that it was.”
For Ukraine, however, the incident was evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to raise the stakes of the yearlong conflict in Ukraine and draw in Washington.
“The incident with the American MQ-9 Reaper UAV, provoked by russia in the Black Sea, is putin’s signal of readiness to expand the conflict zone with the involvement of other parties,” Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council secretary Oleksiy Danilov said on Twitter.
“The purpose of this all-in tactic is to always be raising the stakes,” he added.
Isaac Brekken/Getty Images
NATO diplomats in Brussels confirmed the incident, but said they did not expect it to immediately escalate into a further confrontation.
A Western military source, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said diplomatic channels between Russia and the United States could help limit any fallout.
“To my mind, diplomatic channels will mitigate this,” the source said.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has led to heightened fears of a direct confrontation between Moscow and the NATO alliance, which has been arming Kyiv to help it defend itself.
Reports of a missile strike in eastern Poland in November briefly caused alarm before Western military sources concluded it was a Ukrainian air defense missile, not a Russian one.
During a press conference Tuesday at the Pentagon, Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder wouldn’t say whether the drone was armed and referred to the unmanned aircraft as a MQ-9, but not a Reaper. The U.S. uses MQ-9 Reapers for both surveillance and strikes and has operated the drones in a variety of locations, including in the Middle East and Africa.
“Our MQ-9 aircraft was conducting routine operations in international airspace when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft, resulting in a crash and complete loss of the MQ-9,” said Air Force Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa.
“In fact, this unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians nearly caused both aircraft to crash,” he said.
Ryder said the drone was “unflyable and uncontrollable so we brought it down,” adding that the collision also likely damaged the Russian aircraft, which he said was able to land following the incident.
Several U.S. Reapers have been lost in recent years, including to hostile fire.
One was shot down in 2019 over Yemen with a surface-to-air missile fired by Houthi rebels, U.S. Central Command said at the time.
Reapers can be armed with Hellfire missiles as well as laser-guided bombs and can fly for more than 1,100 miles at altitudes of up to 50,000 feet, according to the Air Force.
It’s been said the best meals come from the heart, not from a recipe book. But at this USDA kitchen, there’s no pinch of this, dash of that, no dollops or smidgens of anything. Here, nutritionists in white coats painstakingly measure every single ingredient, down to the tenth of a gram.
Sheryn Stover is expected to eat every crumb of her pizza; any tiny morsels she does miss go back to the kitchen, where they’re scrutinized like evidence of some dietary crime.
Stover (or participant #8180, as she’s known) is one of some 10,000 volunteers enrolled in a $170 million nutrition study run by the National Institutes of Health. “At 78, not many people get to do studies that are going to affect a great amount of people, and I thought this was a great opportunity to do that,” she said.
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It’s called the Nutrition for Precision Health Study. “When I tell people about the study, the reaction usually is, ‘Oh, that’s so cool, can I do it?'” said coordinator Holly Nicastro.
She explained just what “precise” precisely means: “Precision nutrition means tailoring nutrition or dietary guidance to the individual.”
The government has long offered guidelines to help us eat better. In the 1940s we had the “Basic 7.” In the ’50s, the “Basic 4.” We’ve had the “Food Wheel,” the “Food Pyramid,” and currently, “My Plate.”
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They’re all well-intentioned, except they’re all based on averages – what works best for most people, most of the time. But according to Nicastro, there is no one best way to eat. “We know from virtually every nutrition study ever conducted, we have inner individual variability,” she said. “That means we have some people that are going to respond, and some people that aren’t. There’s no one-size-fits-all.”
The study’s participants, like Stover, are all being drawn from another NIH study program called All Of Us, a massive undertaking to create a database of at least a million people who are volunteering everything from their electronic health records to their DNA. It was from that All of Us research that Stover discovered she has the gene that makes some foods taste bitter, which could explain why she ate more of one kind of food than another.
Professor Sai Das, who oversees the study at Tufts University, says the goal of precision nutrition is to drill down even deeper into those individual differences. “We’re moving away from just saying everybody go do this, to being able to say, ‘Okay, if you have X, Y and Z characteristics, then you’re more likely to respond to a diet, and somebody else that has A, B and C characteristics will be responding to the diet differently,'” Das said.
It’s a big commitment for Stover, who is one of 150 people being paid to live at a handful of test sites around the country for six weeks – two weeks at a time. It’s so precise she can’t even go for a walk without a dietary chaperone. “Well, you could stop and buy candy … God forbid, you can’t do that!” she laughed.
While she’s here, everything from her resting metabolic rate, her body fat percentage, her bone mineral content, even the microbes in her gut (digested by a machine that essentially is a smart toilet paper reading device) are being analyzed for how hers may differ from someone else’s.
Nicastro said, “We really think that what’s going on in your poop is going to tell us a lot of information about your health and how you respond to food.”
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Stover says she doesn’t mind, except for the odd sounds the machine makes. While she is a live-in participant, thousands of others are participating from their homes, where electronic wearables track all kinds of health data, including special glasses that record everything they eat, activated when someone starts chewing. Artificial intelligence can then be used to determine not only which foods the person is eating, but how many calories are consumed.
This study is expected to be wrapped up by 2027, and because of it, we may indeed know not only to eat more fruits and vegetables, but what combination of foods is really best for us. The question that even Holly Nicastro can’t answer is, will we listen? “You can lead a horse to water; you can’t make them drink,” she said. “We can tailor the interventions all day. But one hypothesis I have is that if the guidance is tailored to the individual, it’s going to make that individual more likely to follow it, because this is for me, this was designed for me.”
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Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Ed Givnish.
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