Pentagon releases dramatic video said to show Russian jet collision with U.S. drone over Black Sea near Ukraine

The U.S. military released dramatic video Thursday morning showing a Russian fighter jet colliding with a U.S. MQ-9 “Reaper.” The drone that crashed into the Black Sea. on Tuesday. The US has accused Russia of operating its warplanes in an “unsafe and unprofessional” manner Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula.

On Wednesday, a senior Russian official said Moscow would try to recover the debris from the drone, the chairman of the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, told reporters that may have been an unmanned aerial vehicle during the crash. was broken and whatever debris there was. The Black Sea is likely to sink to a depth of thousands of feet.

“It’s American property,” Milley said at a Pentagon news conference Wednesday. “Clearly, there’s probably not much to recover from.”

An official told CBS News that the Russians have arrived at the crash site and will likely manage to collect some pieces of debris, such as metal fragments, but Milley said the U.S. has not received any sensitive intelligence. Mitigation measures have been taken to prevent gender loss.

“We are absolutely convinced that whatever was valuable is no longer valuable,” he told reporters.

Video released by the Pentagon (above) on Thursday, captured by a camera on an MQ-9, shows first a fighter jet passing close by and then a second pass before it hit the drone’s propeller. was hit Apparently the camera cuts out briefly after the collision but returns to show what the Air Force said was damage to the propeller from the strike.

The Russian jet “dumped fuel on the MQ-9’s propeller and collided with it, forcing US forces to bring the MQ-9 down in international waters,” the Air Force said in a statement accompanying the video.

The video released by US Army European Command was “extensively edited, however, the sequence of events is shown,” the statement said.

Speaking to reporters this week, Air Force Brig. Gen. Pete Ryder did not say whether the drone was armed, and he referred to the unmanned aircraft as the MQ-9, but not by its other name, Reaper. The US uses Reapers for surveillance and strikes and operates aircraft from Europe to the Middle East and Africa.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, speaking to Milley on Wednesday, said he had spoken with his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu following the Black Sea incident, but the US defense chief did not provide details of the conversation. why

“The United States will continue to fly and operate where international law allows, and it is incumbent upon Russia to operate its military aircraft in a safe and professional manner,” Austin told reporters.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said Shoigu had told Austin that the collision was the result of an “escalation”. [U.S.] intelligence activities against the interests of the Russian Federation” and “non-compliance with the restricted flight zone” declared by Moscow during the ongoing war in Ukraine. Ukraine’s southern coast lies on the Black Sea and Crimea. Russia has occupied and claimed the territory as sovereign since 2014.sticks to the body of water.

The Russian ministry said it would respond “proportionately” to any further U.S. “provocations” in the region, warning that “flights of U.S. strategic unmanned aerial vehicles over the Crimean coast are provocative in nature.” , which creates the preconditions for an escalation of tensions. The situation in the Black Sea region.”

“Russia is not interested in such incidents, but will continue to respond proportionately to all provocations,” the defense ministry said.

CBS News’ Eleanor Watson contributed to this report.