A day after the United States said a Russian fighter jet collided with a U.S. Air Force drone above the Black Sea, forcing the unmanned aircraft to crash into the waters below, the Kremlin said Wednesday it wants to retrieve the wreckage.

Hours earlier, John Kirby, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, conceded that the U.S. might not be able to recover the MQ-9 drone.

“It has not been recovered, and I'm not sure that we're going to be able to recover it,” Kirby told CNN. “I mean, where it fell into the Black Sea [is] very, very deep water. So we're still assessing whether there can be any kind of recovery effort mounted. There may not be.”

In televised remarks, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said Moscow, too, was unsure if it could retrieve the drone, but added: “We will certainly have to do that, and we will deal with it. I certainly hope for success.”

The head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin, said the country has the “technical” capabilities to retrieve the debris, from which Russia could potentially collect intelligence.

Kirby said the U.S. “did the best we could to minimize any intelligence value that might come from somebody else getting their hands on that drone.”

The MQ-9 was on a routine intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission in international airspace when it was intercepted Tuesday by two Russian Su-27s, U.S. officials said.

The Russian planes first dumped fuel on and flew in front of the American aircraft “in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner,” U.S. European Command said. Then one of the Russian jets struck the propeller of the drone, causing damage that forced the U.S. to crash it into the sea, according to American officials.

The American aircraft plunged into waters near Snake Island, Ukrainian officials said. Russia briefly occupied the island in the early days of the war before Ukraine recaptured it.

Moscow claims the drone was flying near the Russian border and that after it scrambled fighter jets to intercept it, the MQ-9 crashed on its own after making a sharp maneuver. Russia says its plane did not collide with the drone and no weapons were used to bring it down.

Kirby said there is video from the incident but did not elaborate. U.S. officials are going through the footage, he said.

Washington called the incident a “brazen violation of international law” and summoned Anatoly Antonov, Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., to the State Department on Tuesday.

“We certainly conveyed a very direct message to him about our deep concerns over this reckless, unprofessional behavior by Russian pilots,” Kirby told CNN of the meeting.

In a post on the social media site Telegram, Antonov said he rejected the United States’ allegations.

“The unacceptable actions of the United States military in the close proximity to our borders are cause for concern,” wrote Antonov, who accused the U.S. of gathering intelligence for Ukraine.

“We proceed from the fact that the United States will refrain from further speculations in the media landscape and stop making sorties near the Russian borders,” he added.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday during a virtual meeting on Western military support for Ukraine that the intercept of the drone is part of a “pattern of aggressive, risky and unsafe actions by Russian pilots in international airspace.” He added that the U.S. will not be deterred from flying “wherever international law allows.”

Patrushev said Wednesday the incident was “another confirmation” of the United States’ direct involvement in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

Kirby said he’s concerned about the potential for escalated tensions between Moscow and Washington.

“When you have a situation like this, it does increase the risk of miscalculations, misunderstandings,” he said. “And 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 United States and Russia.”

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, tweeted Wednesday that he believes the incident is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “signal of readiness to expand the conflict zone with the involvement of other parties.”