prime merely the northeast and eastern part of the country. what this really means is that we not only have to protect the skies and the types of deconfliction protocols we ve worked out since the syrian civil war, but also we have to protect the forces on the ground. special operations forces are there. folks who are handling relations with the kurdish forces, all kitically important pieces of the element right here in syria. these aggressive actions now we re seeing them over syria in these astounding numbers. we have been seeing them as well over ukraine. absolutely and with the black sea right next to ukraine. you may remember this is the footage of an su-27 going after a drone. this is footage from the mq9 reaper approached by the russian jet and the russian fighter is dumping fuel all over it, ended up destroying the drone because it had to be crashed, if was no
easily fly over 1,800 miles in distance. key thing. key things they re going after, incidents like this. su-35 jets from the russian air force attacking the f 16s, doing maneuvers as if they were attacking f 16s and coming in as if they were going to do a dogfights. you can see from the gun camera footage right here. so what that means is that they re engaged in maneuvers that are really dangerous to the f 16s that are currently deployed over syria. we re bringing a far more capability aircraft, f-22 in to view that. when you look at numbers of this, since the beginning of march russia has violated those deconfliction protocols 85 times. i mean, that s a lot. we can t forget as you pull up this next slide that the u.s. has a military presence here. right. 900 service members based in syria right now. in various locations throughout the country.