Russia hustles to recover wrecked US drone as Pentagon says nothing of value left
Russia is scrambling to recover the remains of a $30 million US surveillance drone that was downed in the Black Sea Tuesday after it collided with one of Moscow’s fighter jets — while the Pentagon has yet to send any crews to retrieve the craft.
A number of Russian naval vessels were spotted at the crash site Thursday, with a US official telling Fox News: “They wasted no time.”
However, the Pentagon has said that it doubts the Kremlin could extract anything of value from the drone, which officials suggested was lying in pieces at the bottom of the sea.
“There likely [isn’t] going to be a whole lot left of it to recover,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters Thursday. “And the water there is very deep – several thousand feet deep.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley on Wednesday estimated the debris was under “maybe 4,000 or 5,000 feet” of water, adding that “any recovery operation is very difficult at that depth by anyone.”
At the same time, a spokesperson for the US Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) said the recovery of the MQ-9 Reaper was a “priority,” while a Pentagon spokesman would not deny reports that US allies were working to recover what was left of the craft — since the US currently has no ships in the area.
“I’d allow our allies to speak for themselves in that regard,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said Thursday.
“We do have a lot of allies and friends in the area,” Milley said a day earlier. “We’ll work through recovery operations.”
The new developments come as dramatic declassified footage released by the US European Command on Thursday shows one of the two harassing Russian Su-27 fighter jets colliding with the drone, damaging its propeller so much that the US had to sacrifice the vehicle.
The 4,900-pound, 36-foot-long spy drone is used mainly to gather intelligence, but can also carry weapons and offers “significant loiter time, wide-range sensors, multi-mode communications suite and precision weapons,” according to the Air Force.
Those assets and the possibility of greater insight into US surveillance capabilities are attractive to Russia, though Milley claimed the military took “mitigating measures” to protect intelligence from being retrieved.
“So we are quite confident that whatever was of value is no longer of value,” he said.
Officials have not said whether it was only the impact of the drone against the water’s surface that caused it to break apart or if it was destroyed before crashing.
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 local media reports.
“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 added.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Russian military will recover the drone if it’s necessary for its 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.
