MOSCOW, March 16. /TASS/. The West has has long defiantly brushed off Russian proposals to take action in averting dangerous incidents, including mid-air incidents - an effort that would have been useful in the incident involving the US drone that crashed into the Black Sea, Konstantin Gavrilov, head of the Russian delegation at the Vienna talks on military security and arms control, said on Rossiya-24 television on Thursday.
"At all meetings over the past two years, before the start of the special operation, the Russian delegation proposed this: Let's discuss specifically the measures that need to be taken so that aircraft and ships don’t get dangerously close to each other, and exercises are pulled back from the borders of the alliance and Russia. All of this has been proposed. They pointedly ignored them. But now, when it happened [with the US drone], it may have been useful," the diplomat said.
He said that Russia had established a restricted area for flights in connection with the special operation in Ukraine.
"And they purposely fly into this zone and escalate reconnaissance. And then, poof - they crashed. And now flights have been stopped for three days for all drones in Europe in the north and south," Gavrilov said.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the US MQ-9 drone was spotted near the Crimean Peninsula on Tuesday morning. The drone’s transponders were turned off "in violation of the boundaries of the area where temporary airspace rules were established for the purpose of conducting a special military operation and brought to the attention of all users of international airspace and published in accordance with international standards," the Defense Ministry said. The ministry said Russian fighter jets didn’t engage their weapons, and the drone went out of control due to quick maneuvering, subsequently crashing into the sea.
The US European Command said a Russian Su-27 aircraft hit the propeller of the drone, prompting its crashing into the Black Sea.