Russia threatened to shoot down French surveillance craft over Black Sea, officials say

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Russian forces threatened to shoot down a French surveillance aircraft patrolling in international airspace over the Black Sea, a signal of increasingly aggressive behavior from Moscow as its invasion of Ukraine struggles to make headway, French defense officials said Thursday. "A Russian air traffic control system threatened to shoot down French aircraft in the Black Sea when we were in a free international zone where we patrol," the French defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said on RTL radio. A French military spokesman, Col. Pierre Gaudillière, said Lecornu was referring to an incident in mid-November that involved one of France's four giant Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS, surveillance aircraft that was flying over international waters in the Black Sea.