MOSCOW - Russia's defence ministry said on Tuesday that its fighter jets did not come into contact with a US drone that crashed into the Black Sea earlier, claiming instead that the drone crashed due to "sharp manoeuvring".
"The Russian fighters did not use their on-board weapons, did not come into contact with the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) and returned safely to their home airfield," Sputnik reported the defence ministry as saying.
Pentagon spokesperson Pat Ryder declined to disclose whether the US MQ-9 Reaper drone was armed.
"I'm not going to get into the specific profile of this particular aircraft. As you know the MQ-9 does have the ability to be armed," Ryder said during a press briefing.
The US military said a Russian fighter jet dumped fuel on an American drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday then collided with it, causing the drone to crash.
US European Command said two Russian Su-27 fighters intercepted the MQ-9 Reaper over international waters and one clipped its propeller.
"Several times before the collision, the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner," it said.
The statement confirmed an earlier report by AFP of an incident involving a US-made drone in the area.
Russian intercepts over the Black Sea were common, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told journalists in Washington, but this one "is noteworthy because of how unsafe and unprofessional it was, indeed reckless that it was".
Nato diplomats in Brussels confirmed the incident, but said they did not expect it to immediately escalate into a further confrontation.
A Western military source, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said that diplomatic channels between Russia and the US could help limit any fall-out.
"To my mind, diplomatic channels will mitigate this," the source said.
The US summoned Russia's ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, to Washington on Tuesday after the incident, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said.
The US ambassador to Moscow has conveyed a strong message to Russia's foreign affairs ministry and US. officials had briefed allies and partners about the incident, Price told reporters on a phone briefing.
"We are engaging directly with the Russians, again at senior levels, to convey our strong objections to this unsafe, unprofessional intercept, which caused the downing of the unmanned US aircraft," Price said.
Calling the incident a "brazen violation of international law," Price declined to say what response US ambassador Lynne Tracy in Moscow received from the Russians when she conveyed Washington's protest.
He referred reporters to the Department of Defense when asked about the effort to recover the downed drone.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February last year has led to heightened fears of a direct confrontation between Moscow and the Western Nato military alliance, which has been arming Kyiv to help it defend itself.
News of a missile strike in eastern Poland in November last year briefly caused alarm before Western military sources concluded that it was a Ukrainian air defence missile that had malfunctioned, not a Russian one.
The US uses MQ-9 Reapers for surveillance and strikes, and has long operated over the Black Sea keeping an eye on Russian naval forces.
"Our MQ-9 aircraft was conducting routine operations in international airspace when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft, resulting in a crash and complete loss of the MQ-9," said US Air Force General James Hecker, commander of US Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa.
"In fact, this unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians nearly caused both aircraft to crash.
"US and allied aircraft will continue to operate in international airspace and we call on the Russians to conduct themselves professionally and safely," he added.
The US statement said that pilots had brought the Reaper down in international waters, while the US Naval Institute said it had crashed off the coast of Odessa in south-east Ukraine.
Several US Reapers have been lost in recent years, including to hostile fire.
One was shot down in 2019 over Yemen with a surface-to-air missile fired by Huthi rebels, the US Central Command said at the time.
According to media reports, a US MQ-9 crashed in Libya in 2022, while another went down during a training exercise in Romania earlier in the same year.
Reapers can be armed with Hellfire missiles as well as laser-guided bombs and can fly for more than 1,770km at altitudes of up to 15,000m, according to the US Air Force.
AFP and REUTERS