According to a USAFE spokeswoman, debris from the US MQ-9 Reaper aircraft is still there at the bottom of the Black Sea.
The US Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) have stated that recovering the US MQ-9 Reaper drone, which was shot down on Tuesday in the Black Sea near Russia’s Crimea, is still the military’s top priority.
A representative for USAFE told The Hill newspaper on Thursday, “We take the preservation and retrieval of this aircraft extremely seriously, but the aircraft has not yet been retrieved.
Finding what’s left of the $32-million UAV remained a “priority” for Washington, according to the spokeswoman, who declined to provide specifics on the search effort.
If the Russian military “decides that it’s required for our interests and the security… then they’re going to do it,” said Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov in response to a question on whether Moscow will try to retrieve the US drone itself.
Nikolay Patrushev, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, had earlier declared that Moscow will “certainly attempt” to remove the UAV from the Black Sea’s bottom. Although admitting that it will be challenging to pull off, Patrushev stated that he still hoped for a positive end.
The MQ-9 Reaper had fallen close to Crimea, so Russia would have a “easier time” finding it than the US, according to The Hill, which also cautioned that “the retrieval of the drone by Moscow might raise severe intelligence issues for Washington.”
General Mark Milley, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated at a briefing on Wednesday that the US military has used unnamed “mitigating measures” to reduce Russia’s capacity to gather intelligence from the drone. We are absolutely certain that whatever was valuable is no longer valuable, he added.
Milley said that the UAV “probably broke apart,” which means that there isn’t much data that can be retrieved from it anyhow, and that it sunk in a region of the water that was about 5,000 feet (about 1.5 km) deep.
The Military asserts that a risky intercept by Russian Su-27 fighter planes caused its MQ-9 Reaper to fall into the Black Sea. One of the Su-27s ultimately struck and damaged the drone’s tail propeller after the jets repeatedly flew near to it and dropped gasoline on it, the report claimed.
The American drone halted after performing a risky manoeuvre, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, which disputed that there had been a collision and said that its pilots had behaved properly. According to Moscow, the incident only occurred because the UAV ventured into an area that had been declared off-limits because of the current Russian military action in Ukraine.
