VIDEO: Military Releases Video of Russian Attack on US Drone

The global community has been on edge for well over a year now, wondering if the next figurative shoe to drop will usher in World War III…or worse.

Perhaps the most significant driver of these fears is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is going so horribly wrong that the Kremlin has begun threatening to use nuclear weapons in order to keep the rest of the world from stepping in and finishing off the already-decimated Russian army.

Vladimir Putin seems to enjoy making these threats, and toying with the possibility of plunging the planet into an apocalyptic conflict – a reality evidenced by the recent downing of a US drone over the Black Sea by Russian fighter jets.

In an effort to combat the Kremlin’s absurd claims about the incident, the American military has now released video footage of the incident to the general public.

U.S. officials have released video that shows a Russian Su-27 fighter jet colliding with the propeller of a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone.

The video release by the U.S. military’s European Command on Thursday came amid a race to secure the downed American aircraft.

Russian ships are at the MQ-9 drone crash site in the Black Sea, a U.S. defense official told Fox News Thursday. Russia sent ships to search the debris field almost immediately following the crash.

The war of words between the two nations is nothing new, but has taken on a new air of urgency as Putin finds his back to the wall.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin summarized the incident Wednesday in a press conference, saying, “Two Russian jets dumped fuel on an unmanned U.S. MQ-9 aircraft conducting routine operations in international airspace. And one Russian jet intercepted and hit our MQ-9 aircraft, resulting in a crash.”

Austin sharply criticized the Russian military for its actions, stating that the Black Sea incident was “a part of a pattern of aggressive and risky and unsafe actions by Russian pilots in international airspace.”

Russia has previously denied that the aircraft touched one another, and accused the U.S. of unnecessarily escalating the issue.

The incident had “World War III” trending on Twitter earlier in the week.

Video of this Russian aggression can be seen below.