Russian Warplane Hits American Drone Over Black Sea, U.S. Says: Live Updates

The Reaper, flying at about 25,000 feet, has sophisticated cameras and other sensors that can peer into Russian-controlled Crimea from international air space — a typical mission, the official said.

But this mission quickly took a dangerous turn.

The much faster Russian warplanes repeatedly zoomed around the propeller-driven Reaper and dumped fuel on it, apparently in an effort to sully the drone’s cameras or damage its other sensors, the official said.

The episode stunned U.S. military officials watching via a video feed from the drone to an operations center at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Senior U.S. officials have been worried for months that some sort of incident,over the Black Sea, including a miscommunication, could lead to a confrontation.

The statement was a flat denial of allegations by the United States military, which said that two Russian Su-27 jets had intercepted the MQ-9 surveillance drone on Tuesday morning over international waters, then dumped fuel on the aircraft and flew in front of it in a “reckless” manner. U.S. military officials in Europe said one of the Russian fighters struck the drone’s propeller, prompting its operators to put it down in the water.

John F. Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, called the Russians’ actions “unsafe and unprofessional.”

But the Russian military said that it was not responsible for the crash.

The Defense Ministry said the drone was flying near Crimea — the Ukrainian territory that Russia illegally annexed in 2014 — and toward the border of the Russian Federation. It said the drone was flying with its identifying transponder off, contrary to the instructions issued by Russia for the airspace over its military operations in Ukraine.

Russia’s air force scrambled fighter jets to identify the drone, the ministry said, which then executed sharp maneuvers that sent it into an unguided flight, causing it to lose altitude and hit the water.

While Russian forces now control the eastern half of Bakhmut, Ukrainian forces in the western half have taken up defensive positions in abandoned fortifications behind a river that bisects the city. Ukrainian officials said they have stabilized control over the last remaining road they can use to supply and reinforce their forces.

The commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, said on Monday that Russian forces, led by mercenaries from the Wagner private military company, were struggling to reach the center of Bakhmut.

“All enemy attempts to capture the city are repelled by artillery, tanks, and other firepower,” he said.

Waged since last summer, the battle for Bakhmut is one of the longest and deadliest since Russia launched its full-scale invasion nearly 13 months ago, and in recent months Moscow has allocated heaps of resources to trying to capture the city.

Some Ukrainian and Western military analysts have questioned the wisdom of maintaining the defensive line around Bakhmut, suggesting that the rate of casualties is running too high to justify holding a town of political and symbolic resonance but only marginal strategic value.

It is difficult to assess the wisdom of Ukraine’s strategy because there are no reliable, independent assessments of casualties. Both sides agree, though, that tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have been injured and killed in the battle.

Ivan Kyrychevskyi, a Ukrainian defense analyst, said that Ukrainian forces had waited as long as they could to withdraw to the western half of the city and had now established “a zone of defeat” where the Russians would continue to lose large numbers of troops, weakening their forces before an expected Ukrainian offensive in the spring.

“The current situation is crucial to the success of our future counteroffensive,” he said.

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In the northwestern corner of Bakhmut, Wagner soldiers posted photographs from an industrial complex, suggesting that they had reached in the same location where Mr. Zelensky had made a daring visit in December to rally Ukrainian soldiers.

The British military’s intelligence agency said on Tuesday that Russia’s shortage of artillery ammunition has likely grown worse in recent weeks, to the extent that forces are rationing shells on many parts of the eastern front.

With Ukrainian soldiers also expressing concerns about their own shortages of ammunition, officials in Kyiv are urging Western allies to speed up delivery of arms. Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, said Tuesday that negotiations were continuing to procure more fighter jets to protect Ukraine’s skies.

Mr. Reznikov told reporters that air power will be critical for a successful counteroffensive, and that Russian forces had already moved into defensive positions in southern Ukraine, where they will try to keep control of a ribbon of land between Crimea from Russia. He also said that Moscow is making contingency plans, by digging an elaborate trench system in Crimea; new trenches are visible in recently released satellite images.

“The Russians believe that the Ukrainians will launch a counteroffensive,” Mr. Reznikov said. “And this is a good sign. We are already creating the future. They have already lost. Once they went on the defensive in their special military operation, they have already lost this war.”

While the Reaper can drop bombs and launch missiles, its slow speed and lack of defensive weapons makes it relatively easy to shoot down.

The MQ-9 Reaper is a newer, larger version of the MQ-1 Predator drone, which the U.S. Air Force used until 2018. The Reapers are faster, have better sensors and can carry more munitions, according to a statement from the U.S. Air Force. The Air Force has paid as much as $32 million for one of them.

Reaper drones are equipped with visual sensors and cameras that make them effective for surveillance. They are flown remotely by a team of pilots and sensor operators on the ground, often far from the drone itself. A pilot controls the takeoff, flight path and landing, while sensor operators control cameras and surveillance equipment.

The United States has used the drones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. While their use in attacks in which civilians were killed has generated criticism, the drones’ defenders have argued that their ability to hit targets with precision minimizes collateral damage.

The United States’ use of the drones in other countries’ airspace also has created tensions over sovereignty.

He said there had been similar “intercepts” by Russian aircraft in recent weeks, calling them “not an uncommon occurrence,” but this was the first to result “in the splashing of one of our drones.”

“This one, obviously, is noteworthy because of how unsafe and unprofessional it was, and indeed, reckless that it was, in causing the downing of one of our aircraft,” Mr. Kirby said. “So it’s unique in that regard.”

He said the drone was flying in international airspace and landed in international waters. The United States does not consider it necessary to advise Russia in advance of such flights, which have been going on for more than a year, he said.

It was not clear if the State Department had lodged an official complaint with Moscow. Mr. Kirby said the flights would continue.

“If the message is that they want to deter or dissuade us from flying and operating in international airspace, over the Black Sea, then that message will fail, because that is not going to happen,” Mr. Kirby said. “The Black Sea belongs to no one nation. And we are going to continue to do what we need to do for our own national security interest in that part of the world.”

“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,” the statement said. “This incident demonstrates a lack of competence in addition to being unsafe and unprofessional.”

John F. Kirby, a National Security Council spokesman, said President Biden was briefed about the episode. Mr. Kirby played down the incident, saying that there had been similar “intercepts” by Russian aircraft in recent weeks. Even so, he said this episode was “noteworthy because of how unsafe and unprofessional it was.”

There was no immediate comment from Russia’s Ministry of Defense. Tass, the Russian state news agency, carried a report about the collision on its website.

U.S. Air Force Gen. James B. Hecker, the commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, said that the unmanned aircraft was “conducting routine operations in international airspace, when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft.” The collision nearly caused both aircraft to crash, he said.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February has heightened tensions between Moscow and Washington and turned the Black Sea, which is dominated by the Russian Navy, into an effective battle zone. Moscow has blockaded Ukrainian vessels within their own ports, though Ukraine has been able to export its grain across the Black Sea under a deal signed last July between the two warring countries.

At the same time, Ukraine has attacked Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea as well as in port, most notably in April, when a Ukrainian missile sank the Moskva, the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, a strike that dented Moscow’s aura of naval invincibility.

The war has also galvanized NATO, not least by strengthening ties between Washington and NATO members that border Russia including Poland and the Baltic States. NATO countries have poured billions of dollars of military aid into supporting Ukraine’s territorial defense, but at the same time the alliance has attempted to avoid directly stoking confrontation with Moscow, a nuclear armed state.

One moment of crisis came in November, when a Ukrainian air-defense missile that was being used to fend off a major Russian aerial assault exploded at a Polish grain plant just over the border, killing two people.

The city of Kherson and neighboring communities have been targeted by Russian shelling since Ukrainian forces drove them from the area in November, but daily Ukrainian military reports of attacks have indicated a marked increase in the intensity of assaults in recent weeks.

While Ukrainian officials release daily updates on Russian strikes that hit civilian targets, they do not release details about any damage to military equipment or concentrations of troops.

At least one person was killed and six more wounded in the Russian attacks on the Kherson region over the past 24 hours, Ukrainian officials said. Moscow “carried out 93 attacks, launching 412 shells and rockets from heavy artillery and Grad multiple-launch rocket systems over the last day,” Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the Kherson regional military administration, said in a statement.

Dmytro Pletenchuk, a spokesman for the Ukrainian military in the region, said the Russians were bombarding “solely to terrorize and demonstrate military presence.”

Shelling of other areas across the entire stretch of the southern and eastern front lines has also increased, according to Ukrainian military reports, statements from Ukrainian emergency services and video footage, as have attacks on Ukrainian communities near the Russian border.

Russian ground forces have in recent weeks mounted dozens of assaults aimed at breaking through Ukrainian defensive lines, without any strategic gains.

As Moscow continues to throw a vast amount of resources into the battle for Bakhmut, a city in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine that has been devastated by months of fighting, Russian pro-war military bloggers have expressed growing concern that Moscow’s forces could eventually be overwhelmed by what they say are large numbers of Ukrainian troops massing in the south.

Elsewhere, there were overnight reports of shelling in the border regions of Sumy and Kharkiv as well as in towns and villages across other areas of the front line.

In the eastern city of Kramatorsk, a Ukrainian stronghold about 30 miles from the front, one person was killed and at least three people were injured as a result of a Russian rocket attack that damaged at least six buildings in the city center, the Ukrainian authorities said. At least two people were killed in Kostiantynivka, about 20 miles south of Kramatorsk, and seven wounded in shelling, officials said. The claims could not be independently confirmed.

They were tank mines, hundreds of them, laid out in a checkerboard pattern across his field and presenting a deadly conundrum before the spring planting season.

Farmers who choose to climb into their tractors and work their land risk death or dismemberment from the mines, shells and other ordnance that litter the fields. Those who do not risk economic ruin: The fighting has already cost the southern Kherson region three harvests, and there is no sign that farming will resume its role as an engine of Ukraine’s economy anytime soon.

Producing watermelons, barley, sunflower oil and corn, Ukraine’s fertile lands have sustained generations, delivered huge amounts of food to the world and could now provide a desperately needed lifeline to the country. But although the Russian troops who once occupied many of the fields of southern Ukraine are long gone, they left a colossal array of explosives behind, some abandoned and others rigged as traps.

Separately, another resident of the Kherson region was killed by an anti-tank mine, which exploded in a field as he was driving his car, the statement said.

Although Russian troops who once occupied the region were largely pushed out last fall, they left a colossal array of explosives behind, some abandoned and others rigged as traps. The HALO Trust, a global mine-clearing organization, estimates that mines and explosives may have contaminated a territory the size of Britain.

President Volodymyr Zelensky discussed the danger posed by unexploded mines in his nightly address on Monday. He said that his office is exploring how demining operations can be sped up across the country.

“As of now, more than 170,000 square kilometers of our territory remain dangerous because of enemy mines and unexploded ordnance,” he said. “A significant part of this territory is the land of our farmers, the land that has been cultivated.”

Mines and cluster bombs often hide in fields, where they can be camouflaged easily. The region’s farmers, especially, risk death or dismemberment by the weapons scattered on their land. Many wonder how long it will take — or whether or not it will be possible — to remove them all.

“Pollution of the fields and land mine contamination are too huge,” Denys Marchuk, the deputy chair of the Ukrainian Agrarian Council, said in a news conference on Monday.

Mr. Marchuk estimated that 5 million hectares of land in Ukraine are “contaminated with mines,” which is particularly concerning ahead of the spring planting season. He added that the planting season in the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions will be on hold while the focus remains on mine clearance.

Michael Schwirtz and Stanislav Kozliuk contributed reporting.

The total two-year period aligns with the length of time Ukrainians fleeing the war were later permitted to stay in the United States under a program in a system known as humanitarian parole.

“As Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the unprecedented humanitarian crisis it has caused continue, D.H.S. assesses that there remain urgent humanitarian reasons, as well as a significant public benefit, for extending the parole of certain Ukrainians and family members on a case-by-case basis,” Angelo Fernandez, a homeland security spokesman, said in a statement on Monday.

Nearly 300,000 Ukrainians and their families have entered the country since the start of the war under humanitarian parole, with a visa or as a refugee. More than eight million have fled to European countries in the past year.

The Biden administration had indicated that it would find a way to let the early Ukrainian arrivals extend their stay and work in the United States, but it did not announce a solution until Monday. Thousands of Ukrainians had been left to wonder whether they would have to uproot themselves to find refuge in another country while the war raged on in theirs.

“This process will provide critical relief to thousands of Ukrainians who have been facing tremendous anxiety and uncertainty about their future here,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

Human rights advocates said people from other countries who are in the United States under temporary humanitarian parole should be given similar assurances. Ms. Vignarajah said protections would expire this summer for thousands of Afghans who were among the first to arrive in the United States after the rushed evacuation of Afghanistan in August 2021.

“The administration’s broader use of parole must be accompanied by a thoughtful plan for how and when temporary protections will be extended, and how beneficiaries can access pathways to longer-term status,” she said.

A legislative proposal to give Afghan parolees an opportunity to apply for permanent residency in the United States has failed to get enough Republican support.

Ukraine’s infrastructure minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, said on Twitter on Monday that Russia’s stance would contradict the initial agreement, which said that any extension to the deal would last a minimum of 120 days.

The agreement, brokered by the United Nations and Turkey, was renewed for 120 days in November, with an agreement reached three days before its previous expiration date. It is set to expire again on Saturday.

Talks about a further extension began in Geneva on Monday, and further talks were taking place on Tuesday. Russian officials had indicated that they were not satisfied because Moscow has faced difficulties in exporting its own agricultural products.

Sergei Vershinin, a deputy foreign minister, said in a statement after talks with U.N. officials, which he described as “comprehensive and frank,” that Moscow’s stance “will be determined upon the tangible progress on normalization of our agricultural exports, not in words, but in deeds. Russia “does not object to” an extension of the deal, “but only for 60 days,” Mr. Vershinin said.

The United Nations said that it had taken note of Russia’s 60-day proposal but was committed to preserving “the integrity” of the original 120-day deal. Consultations continue “with all parties, at various levels,” Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the U.N.’s aid coordination agency, told reporters in Geneva.

The U.N. has reported that the agreement has allowed more than 23 million tons of grain to reach world markets. The deal helped to stabilize — and then lower — global food prices that had soared after Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The agreement also provided for unobstructed exports of agricultural products and fertilizers to world markets, a critical step toward preventing a calamitous decline in global food production at a time when climate disasters are aggravating shortages that are causing millions of people to live in acute hunger.

The grain deal was also critical for Ukraine, given the importance of its agricultural exports to its economy and the fact that overland alternatives for grain exports had proved unsatisfactory.

“Last year, the heroic efforts of our farmers and all workers in the agricultural sector made it possible to preserve Ukrainian agricultural production and Ukraine’s global role as a guarantor of food security,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in an overnight speech.

Mr. Vershinin, airing the Kremlin’s complaints, said that while Ukraine’s food exports were running smoothly, Western sanctions had compromised Russian agricultural exports. The exemptions to those sanctions announced by the United States, Britain and the European Union, he said, were “essentially inactive.”

Russia has pushed for months to resume exporting ammonia through a pipeline across Ukraine, to the Black Sea port of Odessa. But Kyiv, in exchange for its consent to that proposal, has countered with a prisoner-of-war swap.

In the meantime, despite Western sanctions exemptions for their agricultural goods, Russian companies said they have run into problems of over-compliance by Western banks, insurance providers and shipping companies that have continued to refuse to work with them.

“From Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine to China’s growing economic coercion, the world is becoming more dangerous,” Mr. Sunak’s office wrote on Twitter. “The UK is responding.”

The updated review described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as one of Moscow’s “assaults on European security,” and said that “the threat from Iran has increased,” as demonstrated by its advancing nuclear program, the country’s destabilizing behavior and threats against individuals in Britain who oppose the government in Tehran.

“As threats and volatility increase, we recognize the growing importance of deterrence and defense to keep the British people safe and our alliances strong,” Mr. Sunak wrote in the foreword to the updated review.

Two developments of “particular concern,” he wrote, were China’s deepening partnership with Russia and Russia’s growing cooperation with Iran following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Mr. Sunak pledged an additional 5 billion pounds, roughly $6.1 billion, in spending on defense over the next two years. He also repeated a promise to increase resources for the military to the equivalent of 2.5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, but without giving a precise time frame for doing so.

The updated review failed to satisfy some hard liners within Mr. Sunak’s Conservative Party, including a former leader, Iain Duncan Smith, who questioned whether the new policy defined the government in Beijing as a threat.

There was also criticism from some lawmakers campaigning for greater military spending. Tobias Ellwood, the chairman of the House of Commons Defense Committee, appealed for a rapid push to spend 2.5 percent of G.D.P. on defense.

“We are sliding toward a new Cold War,” Mr. Ellwood said in Parliament, “threats are increasing, yet here we are, staying on a peacetime budget.”