Lloyd Austin, centre, Mark Milley, and Celeste Wallander attend a virtual meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who said the incident was part of a “pattern of aggressive, risky and unsafe actions by Russian pilots in international airspace,” spoke to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, on Wednesday for the first time in five months. It reflected the Kremlin’s appetite for brinkmanship that could further destabilise the situation and lead to more direct confrontations.

Russia has long voiced concern about US surveillance flights near its borders, but Tuesday’s incident signalled Moscow’s increasing readiness to raise the ante as tensions soar between the two nuclear powers. US officials said the incident showed Russia’s aggressive and risky behaviour and pledged to continue their surveillance. The Kremlin said the flight proved again that Washington is directly involved in the fighting in Ukraine and added that Moscow would try to recover the drone’s wreckage from the Black Sea. At the same time, the two countries’ defence chiefs opened a dialogue about the incident. Russia and the United States ratcheted up their confrontational rhetoric Wednesday over a US surveillance drone that encountered Russian warplanes and crashed near Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, which the Kremlin has illegally annexed.

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