Three U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence said the highest levels of the Kremlin approved the aggressive actions of Russian military fighter jets against a U.S. military drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday.The Russian jets dropped jet fuel on the MQ-9 Reaper, an unprecedented action, and two of the officials said the intelligence suggests the intent seemed to be to throw the drone off course or disable its surveillance capabilities.It was “Russian leadership’s intention to be aggressive in the intercept,” said one of the officials.

Russia will attempt to retrieve and study the wreckage of the American MQ-9 drone that crashed into the Black Sea after being harassed by Russian fighter jets.Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council, told Rossiya-1 TV on Wednesday that he was not certain the drone could be extricated from the water.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon briefing that the drone sank into water that’s 4,000-5,000 feet deep, making its recovery very difficult.“It probably broke up. There’s probably not a lot to recover, frankly,” Milley said. “As far as the loss of anything of sensitive intelligence, etc., as normal we would take and we did take mitigating measures, so we’re quite confident that whatever was of value is no longer of value.”