US drone downing by Russians marks an escalation of conflict near the war zone

 US drone downing by Russians marks an escalation of conflict near the war zone

Russia and China 'signaling' US aircraft in international airspace is nothing new, but the downing of a naval vessel is a worrying development.

On any given day around Ukraine's Black Sea coast, Russian and NATO aircraft and naval vessels, manned and unmanned, buzz nearby, a constant recipe for a superpower crisis along the brink of war.

Both sides have thousands of nuclear warheads as weapons of last resort, and the stakes are raised substantially by reckless behavior.

A Russian Su-27 fighter jet reportedly dumped fuel on and then rammed a US MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday. Photograph: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters

Russia's Defense Ministry has denied any contact between one of its Su-27 fighters and a US MQ-9 Reaper drone that crashed in the Black Sea on Tuesday, insisting the drone went down of its own accord. But the US has detailed allegations of dangerous flights and even dumping fuel on the Reaper to disrupt it - and the Russians have a long record of aggressive behavior.

A 2021 Rand Corporation study analyzing dozens of close-shave cases concluded that it was a matter of policy, which Rand called a "coercive signal."

"Moscow appears to be using coercive signals to send targeted messages about activities it deems problematic," the report said.

"Sometimes the coercive signal goes something like this: the plane will come in to interrogate the target, a shadow in the distance, the wings are clean (no missiles) but our bilateral relationship has deteriorated with increasingly dirty wings (including missiles), and it's gone," Dara Massicot, of the report, said. One of the authors said on Twitter in the wake of the drone incident.

"Sometimes, usually after other methods have been used, the Russian signal will shift to something unsafe and unprofessional to force a change."

The change they are trying to force in this case is to keep U.S. planes and boats away from the edge of the Ukraine war, where Russia's aggression is stagnant and very costly, and Ukrainian forces are benefiting from U.S. intelligence support.

There have been close encounters since Russia's initial attack in 2014. In 2017, a Su-27 flew dangerously close to an RC-135 Rivet joint surveillance aircraft. The following year, a Russian fighter jet flew across the nose of a US EP-3 spy plane, and in 2020, a Su-27 flew directly in front of a US B-52 bomber.

A drone pilot with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) performs a pre-flight check on an MQ-9 Reaper camera system before flying a mission over the US-Mexico border on November 4, 2022, at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. © John Moore, Getty Images via AFP

Tuesday's incident is more serious as it led to a collision and crash landing in the sea. It was quite possibly an error. The US European Command pointed to the incompetence of the Russian pilot. But Massicot said that "a deliberate push cannot yet be ruled out" in this case.

The collision cost the United States a rig worth up to $32 million and set off a race to the wreckage in the Black Sea. If the Russians got there first, it would be a boon of intelligence, allowing their experts to drill into its interior at leisure.

U.S. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger said situations like these drone downings are the biggest concern of the U.S. military because of the unpredictability of the chain of events that could occur in their wake.

Berger said this is also a concern in the Pacific region. In fact, the last time a US warplane was involved in such a collision, it was off the Chinese coast in April 2001, when a US EP-3 aircraft was hit by a Chinese interceptor jet on its third close pass. The Chinese plane crashed into the sea and the US spy plane was forced to land on the Chinese island of Hainan, causing a diplomatic crisis.

Shooting down an expensive drone over the Black Sea is one thing, but destroying a manned aircraft and killing the pilots or forcing it to land in hostile territory in the middle of a war would lead to an even more destabilizing situation, putting pressure on the other side to take drastic action. .

There are open military lines of communication and long-standing conflict-de-escalation mechanisms to stop situations from getting out of hand, but every time something like this happens, the world uses a little more of its luck.