Kirby said the US “took steps to protect the information and to protect,to minimise any effort by anybody else to exploit that drone for useful content.”

Sergei Naryshkin,the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service,said Russia has the technological capability to recover the drone’s fragments.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov repeated the Defence Ministry’s statement that Russian jets didn’t use their weapons or impact the US drone. He repeated his description of US-Russia relations as at their lowest point but added that “Russia has never rejected a constructive dialogue,and it’s not rejecting it now.”

In Washington,Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov expressed concern about “the unacceptable actions of the US military in the close proximity to our borders.”

“What do they do thousands of miles away from the United States?” he said in remarks the Russian Embassy released on Wednesday. “The answer is obvious – they gather intelligence which is later used by the Kyiv regime to attack our armed forces and territory.”

“It is the US that is leading the situation to a deliberate escalation fraught with a direct armed conflict,” he said,adding that the US would have acted more forcefully if a Russian aircraft had appeared near US borders.

“Let us ask a rhetorical question:if,for example,a Russian strike drone appeared near New York or San Francisco,how would the US Air Force and Navy react?” Antonov wrote on the embassy’s Telegram channel. “I am quite confident that the US military would act in an uncompromising way and would not allow its airspace or territorial waters to be breached.”

He noted that “it is important that the lines of communication should remain open,” emphasising that “Russia does not seek confrontation and stands for pragmatic co-operation in the interests of the peoples of our countries”.

US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said the Russian intercept was part of a “pattern of aggressive,risky and unsafe actions by Russian pilots in international airspace”. He said Russia must operate its aircraft in a safe manner.

“Make no mistake,the US will continue to fly and to operate wherever international law allows,” Austin said in remarks before a virtual meeting of a US-led effort to co-ordinate Western military support for Ukraine.

While encounters between Russian and NATO aircraft are not unusual — before the invasion of Ukraine,NATO planes were involved in an annual average of 400 intercepts with Russian planes — the war has heightened the significance and potential hazards of such incidents.

“The last thing that we want,certainly the last thing that anybody should want,is for this war in Ukraine to escalate to become something between the US and Russia,to have this actually ... expand beyond that,” Kirby said,speaking on CNN.

“We’ve been working very,very hard throughout the beginning of this conflict ... to make sure that it doesn’t escalate into,particularly into that area,” he added.

The secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council,Oleksiy Danilov,tweeted the drone incident was “a signal from Putin that he is ready to expand the conflict zone,with drawing other parties in”.

Separately,the UK defence ministry said British and German air force fighter jets were scrambled on Tuesday to intercept a Russian aircraft near Estonian airspace. The UK and Germany are conducting joint air policing missions in Estonia as part of NATO’s bolstering of its eastern flank.

The defence ministry said the Typhoon jets responded after a Russian air-to-air refuelling aircraft failed to communicate with Estonian air traffic control. The Russian plane did not enter the airspace of Estonia,a NATO member.

In Ukraine,at least three civilians were killed and another 23 wounded in Russian strikes over the previous 24 hours,Ukraine’s presidential office said.

In eastern Ukraine’s partially occupied Donetsk province,where much of the heaviest fighting has been concentrated,Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said 14 cities and villages were shelled. That included Kramatorsk,where some of Ukraine’s forces are based.

AP

Get a note directly from our foreigncorrespondentson what’s making headlines around the world.Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.