The drone would have been unarmed with a reconnaissance package. It wasn't there to shoot at Russians. No real risk to the fighter pilots So, the Russians would have made the first move. It would not have been anything dangerous to their aircraft or pilots. Those are too valuable to lose.
But one thing they would want is to salvage an intact recon package. The best chance of that would be to do something that disabled the drone without smashing it into little pieces. No missiles, then. Even cannon fire might be too much.
The Russians have brilliant engineers. They probably came up with something inexpensive they thought might work and tried it out. Something that would wreck the propulsion system without damage to the rest of the unit.
Did it work? Nobody who knows is going to tell us.
My guess is that the drone was ditched in the Caspian Sea and the Russians may try to salvage it if they can. The drone mission planners may have installed self-destruct mechanisms before the drone launched, or maybe they did not consider that important.
Unless it was armed. Or suddenly flew into the jets’ path. Ever try to turn a car at 50mph vs 5mph? At which speed is easier to avoid a collision?
Sorry, no ‘benefit of the doubt’ for USA here. Lied far too often already on more than there is room here to recount, but in particular what actually is happening in Uke-land.
My guess is the drone was out surveilling the russkies to help the Ukes, got spotted and harassed by the russkies with them pissing jet fuel all over the drone, and then got in the way of the much harder to turn jet’s flightpath to collide with it. Lucky the jet wasn’t downed.