"To be perfectly frank, no one can really match the U.S. in conventional terms, and certainly not Russian armed forces", said Borshchevskaya.
The incident happened just after midnight on Tuesday when an armed, Iranian-made Shahed 129 drone was said to be advancing on coalition forces who were stationed at a combat outpost northeast of At Tanf, about 13 miles from the border with Iraq.
It was an Iranian-made Shahed 129 and was thought to be armed and in firing range of U.S. troops.
A USA warplane shot down an Iranian-made drone operated by pro-regime forces in Syria early Tuesday, officials said, prompting growing global concern over rising tensions between the two sides. Russian Federation backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Iran also supports, while the USA -led coalition is aligned with groups that oppose the Assad regime and ISIS.
As well as announcing that US-led coalition warplanes would be tracked, Russia's ministry of defence suspended a hotline set up to avoid clashes between United States and Russian aircraft over Syria.
Russian Federation said Washington had failed to use the line - a vital incident-prevention tool - before targeting the plane near Raqqa.
U.S. support of anti-Islamic State militias such as the ones in At Tanf and the Syrian Democratic Forces has increasingly put it into direct conflict with Syria and its allies Russia, Iran, and Shiite militias.
The incident follows Sunday's downing of a Syrian SU-22, a Russian-made attack jet. Iran's Revolutionary Guard described the strike as revenge for Islamic State attacks on Tehran earlier this month that killed at least 18 people and wounded more than 50. The Syrian Armed Forces said in a statement that the pilot was missing.
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In another complication, Iran on Sunday launched ballistic missile strikes at Islamic State targets in eastern Syria, the first time it has carried out such an action.
When asked about the downing, White House Secretary Sean Spicer said that that United States wanted to keep an open line of communication with the Russians.
In response, the U.S. Central Command issued its own statement, saying the Syrian aircraft was shot down "in collective self-defense of coalition-partnered forces".
A second USA official said the use of ballistic missiles may also have been intended as a signal that Iran remains committed to supporting Assad and a reminder that U.S. forces and bases in the region are within reach of Iranian missiles and ground forces.
A US warplane shot down an armed Iranian drone over Syrian territory on Tuesday.
Analysts have seen the US moves as not guided by an overarching strategy but, rather, as impulsive gestures toward controlling Syrian territories abandoned by the Islamic State group while only coordinating its moves with government-aligned forces on an ad hoc basis, raising the risk of grave miscalculations or inadvertently fatal clashes. "That would be another mistake on the scope of the Iraq War".
"With (the help of) intensive Russian bombing they are trying to advance but we are repelling them", he said.
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