Remain calm, nothing happened. So what if there was a military confrontation between a Russian fighter jet and a U.S. drone which crashed or was shot down – we will never know – in the Black Sea, on the outskirts of a war that has been low intensity since 2014 and became a war of aggression with the Russian invasion since February 2022? It’s just one more step, the missing piece of the puzzle of World War III waiting to be put back together. But remain calm.
The Americans, “defeated” on the occasion, both lowered and raised their tone by insisting that the Black Sea is no longer Russia’s domestic lake. They are right: with NATO’s enlargement to the east the Black Sea, with dozens of American and NATO bases in Bulgaria and Romania, the Black Sea is now something else – but is that worse or better from the point of view of peace?
Furthermore, everything is said to have happened “in international waters”: just like it was also in international waters, real or supposed, that “incidents” have been said to happen such as the Tonkin incident in 1964, which was how the United States invented its war of aggression against Vietnam, as the Pentagon Papers tell us.
It’s a serious development: on one hand, the direct Russian-American confrontation in the skies took place at a moment that had seen the revival of the admittedly difficult prospect of negotiations, not only with the Vatican, towards which Putin’s altar boy Kirill is showing openness this time, but because of the active role of China, which has put on the table the agreement it secured between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The result was that the White House, taken aback, was keen to let everyone know: “We encouraged Xi Jinping to listen to Zelensky.” On the other hand, this came in the times of the US deal of the century: three nuclear submarines sold to Australia, undermining the anti-nuclear treaties, infuriating Beijing and increasing the militarization of the Pacific and Asia.
So, can we say that what happened with the drone and jets in the Black Sea was just an accident? Not really. For now, one has to wonder what the response of NATO and the US will be – for a bloody conflict that so far has not been fought in the air as much as with trench warfare.
NATO and the US are saying that now allied overflights will intensify, and already British and German jets are “intercepting” Russian planes over the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. In light of the Atlantic alliance’s promises – saying it was ready to provide Kyiv with new fighter jets, including from Finland -there is a risk that an explosive no-fly zone will be created, not so much over Ukrainian skies, but even worse: in the airborne theater of war in the Black Sea.
As the war looks more and more like the real insurance policy of the Meloni government, who is using it to justify, together with the rest of Europe, the rearmament policy because “the arsenals are now emptied” due to the many arms shipments to Kyiv, one can only wonder: are fighter-bombers and drones weapons of defense or offense, since they have already been used to strike Russian territory?
