War A Russian fighter collides with an American drone over the Black Sea
Direct Ukrainian war, last minute
If there is one diplomat in
Washington
who must feel lonely, it is the Russian ambassador,
Anatoli Antonov.
Since his arrival in the US capital, in 2017, relations between the two countries have gone downhill, with mutual expulsions of diplomats and, finally, with Antonov himself withdrawing to Moscow
for
more than three months, after the US president Joe Biden called
Vladimir Putin a "murderer".
Then the invasion of
Ukraine
- which Antonov denied was happening just four days before it began - has reduced the social life of the Russian embassy and Antonov's residence to zero.
Yesterday, Antonov left this "internal exile" to go to the
State Department,
where he received a formal protest for what clearly appears to be the intentional shooting down of the US MQ-9 "Reaper" drone in international airspace over the
Black Sea.
The Russian representative, famous for being a "hard man" very close to Putin, did not seem to be unmoved, and as he left the headquarters of US diplomacy, he told the Russian state news agency RIA that for Russia the incident is "
a
provocation ".
The
Pentagon
has limited itself to commenting on the Russian action, and has not clarified whether it will take measures to protect its unmanned aircraft in the region,
Clashes between Russian and American ships in the Black Sea are a constant, especially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the
annexation of Crimea in 2014,
and the videos of some of them, in which Russian fighter-bombers are seen making passes in Low-flying flight over American ships (some of them based in
Rota)
are accessible on social networks.
In his statements to
RIA;
Antonov implied that there would be no US retaliation, saying the meeting had been "constructive" and that there had been no discussion of possible "consequences."
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