The US military sent another spy drone over the Black Sea on Friday, maintaining distance from the restricted airspace in which an MQ-9 drone, flying ‘silently’ without a transponder, crashed earlier this week after being intercepted by Russian jets.
Flight tracking sites showed a UAV with the callsign Forte10, identified as an RQ-4 Global Hawk, circling over Romanian airspace before flying south and east. The drone circled over the eastern part of the Black Sea but never came closer than 100 kilometers to Crimea.
One pro-Ukrainian observer tweeted that the Black Sea portion of the mission took only two hours instead of the usual 12, calling it “definitely the strangest route that I have ever seen the RQ-4 take.”