A video released by the U.S. Department of Defense on Thursday shows a Russian fighter jet dumping fuel onto a U.S. drone in what appears to be a close encounter over the Black Sea.
The video, which was taken from the U.S. Navy’s MQ-9 Reaper drone, shows the Russian Sukhoi Su-27 fighter jet flying extremely close to the drone before dumping fuel on it.
The video does not show any interaction between the two aircraft, but the Pentagon said in a statement that the incident was “unsafe and unprofessional.”
“The U.S. aircraft was operating in international airspace and did nothing to provoke this Russian behavior,” the statement said.
The Pentagon said that it will work with the Russian government to “prevent incidents like this from happening in the future.”