Originally Posted by
henra
They did try to shower the drone in a way that it gets ingested into the engine. The first one was close miss.
The fuel dump was quite clearly an attempt to down the drone in an only semi- violent way. So that there would be no trace of explosives / shrapnel. I wonder if they forgot that these drones have cameras.
Remember the Russians have this concept of utterly implausible denial; downing it without a weapon enables them to claim it was an accident even though no-one except the most credulous State TV devotee actually believes it.
I do wonder whether, if the operators still had control authority, they tried to glide it within range of land-based anti-shipping missiles
