Moscow: Russia will try to retrieve the wreckage of a US surveillance drone that crashed into the Black Sea two days back, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said.
“I don’t know if we will be able to get the remains or not, but it is a must to do it and we will do it. I hope, of course, it will be a success,” Patrushev told a Russian TV programme on Wednesday.
There are technical possibilities for Russia to find and study the wreckage of the drone, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergei Naryshkin said on the programme.
The US is conducting intelligence activities in the Black Sea “very actively, using all means” and Russia knows about the US goals in detail, Naryshkin added.
Russia-US relations are “at their lowest point, in a very deplorable state,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday, commenting on the drone incident, Xinhua news agency reported.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been informed of the situation, and there were no Moscow-Washington contacts at the highest level over the incident, Peskov told a daily briefing.
Russian Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, on Tuesday called the incident “a provocation,” stressing that “we must be very careful in our actions given the events that are taking place in Eastern Europe”.
According to the Russian Defence Ministry on Tuesday, Russian fighter jets were scrambled to identify a US MQ-9 drone approaching the Russian state border, and the unmanned aerial vehicle crashed into the Black Sea due to its own sharp maneuvering.
–IANS
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