The race is on between Russia and the United States to recover the remains of a US surveillance drone that was downed in the Black Sea after an encounter with Moscow fighter jets.
A number of Russian naval vessels have been spotted at the crash site as Ukrainian military officials remarked on an unusual amount of activity in the area.
At the same time, a spokesperson for the US Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) said the recovery of the MQ-9 Reaper that the US had to ditch in the Black Sea on Tuesday is a “priority.”
The new developments come as dramatic declassified footage released by the US European Command on Thursday shows one of the two Russian Su-27 fighter jets colliding with the drone and damaging its propeller.
The damage forced the US to down the drone in the Black Sea.
Russian ships have arrived at the crash site, Fox News reported on Thursday, citing a US defense official.
“They wasted no time,” the official said.
Ukrainian defense forces said they have noticed “atypical activity” in the Black Sea and said Russia has moved about 20 vessels to the area, according to media reports in Ukraine.
“We are carefully monitoring the naval group in the Black Sea and the enemy’s actions. Atypical activity and the number of ship grouping were recorded,” Ukraine’s Southern Defense Forces spokeswoman Natalia Humeniuk said.
“Currently, there are 20 [naval] units in the Black Sea, including four missile carriers – one of which is underwater – 28 missiles, at most, can be equipped for launch,” she said.
The USAFE spokesperson would not go into details but said the recovery of the $32 million drone is a “priority.”
“We take the protection and recovery of this aircraft very seriously, but the aircraft has not been recovered at this time,” the spokesperson said in a statement to The Hill.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told reporters on Wednesday that recovery of debris would be difficult because of the depth of the water where the aircraft was downed.
“It’s probably about maybe 4,000 or 5,000 feet of water, something like that. So any recovery operation is very difficult at that depth by anyone,” he said.
And while the US currently has no ships in the region, “we do have a lot of allies and friends in the area. We’ll work through recovery operations,” Milley said.
He also said he doesn’t believe there’s a “lot to recover,” and addressing the possibility of losing sensitive intelligence pointed out that “we did take mitigating measures.”
“So we are quite confident that whatever was of value is no longer of value,” Milley said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Russian military will recover the drone if it’s necessary for their own national security.
“This is the prerogative of the military. If they deem it necessary to do that in the Black Sea for our interests and for our security, they will deal with that,” Peskov said Thursday, according to Russian news outlet Tass.