[REGNUM] The United States blamed Russia for the loss of an American MQ-9 Reaper drone off the coast of Crimea. Conflicting versions are being issued in Washington. According to one of them, an expensive drone crashed literally “because of a bucket of kerosene” - fuel that was accidentally drained by the Russian Su-27. What was the “Reaper” (as the name of the drone is translated as) tracking down at the Russian borders?
The US Department of Defense announced the loss of the MQ-9 Reaper reconnaissance and strike drone in the Black Sea. According to the American version, Russian Su-27 fighters were raised to intercept the drone, which, actively maneuvering in the air, knocked the drone off course, after which it deviated from the route and fell. According to the Pentagon, during the incident, the fighters carried out an emergency fuel dump on the MQ-9 route, which led to the loss of control over the drone.
Another version, which does not quite coincide with the first, was presented by the European Command of the US Armed Forces. They claim here: one of the two Russian Su-27 aircraft hit the propeller of an American drone, which led to its crash in the waters of the Black Sea, TASS reports.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the American reconnaissance and strike drone MQ-9, whose route passed in the region of the Crimean peninsula, performed unsafe actions near the coast, turning off the transponders. Due to sharp maneuvering, the device went into uncontrolled flight with a loss of altitude and collided with the surface of the water. The Russian Aerospace Forces did not use airborne weapons, did not come into contact with the drone, and returned safely to their home airfield.
WHERE DO THE SCOUTS COME FROM?
Our specialists have had the opportunity to observe the flights of Reaper vehicles near our borders on numerous occasions. American drones have been making reconnaissance flights to the borders of Crimea for the past eight years. According to the Flightradar service , which monitors air traffic, American reconnaissance drones, as a rule, operate in conjunction with radar and/or electronic intelligence aircraft.
Reaper reconnaissance and strike drones (literally translated as “Reaper”) also operate in conjunction with the heavier RQ-4 Global Hawk drones with the callsign Forte11. The devices take off from US Air Force bases in Crete, Sicily, and also from NATO bases. As a rule, one RQ-4 and several MQ-9s are involved in one sortie, which disable the transponders.
The downed MQ-9 took off from an air base in Romania on Tuesday morning for a scheduled reconnaissance mission that typically lasts 9 to 10 hours with a 24-hour airborne time limit for the drone. This data is provided by The New York Times, citing a senior Pentagon official.
The drone, according to the source, was not armed, but carried out reconnaissance tasks at an altitude of about 7,600 meters with a maximum flight altitude of up to 13,000 meters. Such sorties are carried out regularly, said a representative of the US military department.
WHAT DID THE "REAPER" COLLECT
The Pentagon refused to disclose what equipment the Reaper carried. "I won't go into details about the characteristics of this drone," Pentagon spokesman Patrick Ryder said.
Washington does not advertise what tasks their reconnaissance aircraft perform in the Black Sea, so they will seek to cover their tracks, Alexei Chadayev, a public figure and head of the Dronnitsa movement, commented to REGNUM.
Specifically, the apparatus that fell into the Black Sea had reconnaissance equipment on board in the form of a payload, the expert believes. “I think that they mainly detected missile launches and aircraft takeoffs to warn the Ukrainians when missile strikes were taking place.
If you talk about what he was carrying on board, it turns out that the United States is thus participating in the conflict on the side of Ukraine. And they don’t want to admit this, ” Chadaev pointed out.
The decision to fly closer to our airspace could be dictated by the desire to "look deeper," the expert noted. For example - "to study the area, conditionally, the left bank of the Dnieper." A deliberate provocation is not excluded as a way to check how our air defense systems will react, Chadayev added.
"Now there is information that the Americans tried to blow it up remotely at the bottom, but ours jammed the control signal. I don’t know if they managed to undermine it, the signal goes so-so under water. So it can be disassembled and studied." the expert believes.
ASSASSIN OF GENERAL SOLEIMANI
"Actually, Reaper is a drone of rather large dimensions: 11 meters long and with a wingspan of 20 meters. It was adopted by the US Air Force in the early 2000s. It is used both for reconnaissance and for strike purposes, like the same Turkish Bayraktar. It is capable of carrying military weapons in the form of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and, as a rule, is used for targeted elimination of conditional "terrorists," Chadayev said.
It was with the help of the "Reapers" that the leaders of various groups were eliminated, as well as the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
"These drones can be effectively used against an enemy that does not have air defense systems. Because with the existence of a powerful air defense system, it is immediately destroyed. So, in fact, it happened with the Bayraktars in the first months of the NMD, when they were constantly shot down," the expert said.
The fact that the "Reapers" are vulnerable to air defense, it became clear during the wars in Libya and Yemen. In 2019, two MQ-9s were shot down by Libyan anti-aircraft gunners, Defense News reported. In both cases, Russian-made Pantsir-S1E installations transferred from the UAE were used. In August 2021, another Reaper was shot down in the skies over Yemen by anti-aircraft fire from Houthi rebels.
In 2020, Forbes reported that the US Air Force generally considers the MQ-9 Reaper drones obsolete and plans to replace them with new models by 2030. But this is a tested product for export - in February, the idea was voiced in the United States to transfer several "Reapers" to the Ukrainian Air Force. Ukraine can join the number of countries operating American combat UAVs, along with France, Japan, Spain, India, Italy and the Netherlands.
Now Washington is using the MQ-9 incident as an excuse to put pressure on the Joe Biden administration - and force him to give the go-ahead to send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine "to increase defense capability."
"It’s definitely not worth expecting them to stop their flights," Chadaev predicts. "They have dozens, if not hundreds of such drones in service, so nothing critical has happened to them. But the damage was done to them in the media field - a device worth $57 million was lost "due to a bucket of kerosene" - jet fuel dropped. Americans look stupid." Now Washington is developing a possible response to inflict comparable damage on us, the expert added.
March 15, 2023
Sergei Adamov.