US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had a telephone conversation with his Russian counterpart Andrei Belousov

The head of the Pentagon had a telephone conversation with the Russian Minister of Defense, the initiator was the American side.

Pentagon spokesman Major General Patrick Ryder said this at a briefing. During a telephone conversation, he said, Austin stressed the importance of maintaining open channels of communication between Moscow and Washington amid the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Ryder noted that contact between the United States and Russia at the level of heads of defense departments last occurred in March 2023, after an incident in the skies over the Black Sea involving an American drone and a Russian fighter jet. Wherein the Pentagon representative did not specify what was the reason for the conversation this time. The Russian side has not yet commented on the negotiations between Austin and Belousov.

Let us remind you, Last spring, Sergei Shoigu, who served as the Russian Defense Minister, and Lloyd Austin held telephone conversations regarding the incident with an American drone that fell into the Black Sea after a collision with a Russian Su-27. The Pentagon then announced “unprofessional, dangerous and reckless behavior” of Russian military pilots in international airspace over the Black Sea.

The Russian Ministry of Defense, in turn, reported that the flights of American UAVs near the coast of occupied Crimea are “provocative in nature” and create “preconditions for an escalation of the situation in the Black Sea zone.”

On June 25, General Stephen Whiting, head of the US Space Command, said that Russia was escalating the situation in space and, after several years of testing, had launched a satellite into orbit that could pose a threat to American spacecraft. The United States takes such actions on the part of Moscow seriously and is working on a response to potential attacks on its spacecraft, Whiting emphasized.

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