US lawmaker condemns attack on Crimea
The American military should not be involved in helping Ukraine to target Russian civilians, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has said in response to the deadly ATACMS strike on a Sevastopol beach.
A volley of ATACMS missiles, provided by the US to Ukraine, targeted Crimea on Sunday. Cluster munitions from one of the missiles struck a busy beach near Sevastopol, killing five civilians and injuring over 150, including children.
“This should not be happening,” Greene posted on X (formerly Twitter). “Imagine if Russia, using a Russian satellite, fired cluster munitions on a Florida beach.”
“The only border our American military should be defending is our own border,” the Georgia Republican added.
Greene was quoting a report that showed a US Global Hawk military drone circling around in the Black Sea during the Ukrainian attack, appearing to help Kiev’s forces with using the US-supplied missiles.
“Are winning hearts and minds? How hard will [US President Joe] Biden continue to poke the bear ahead of the November elections?” the author of the post asked.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, the Ukrainian military fired five ATACMS missiles at Crimea. While Russian air defense systems destroyed four of the projectiles in mid-air, the fifth was damaged, veered off course, and detonated its cluster warhead over a packed beach, killing five civilians and injuring more than 150. Three of the dead were children.
The Kremlin described the beach attack as an act of terrorism and argued that the US was as responsible for it as Ukraine. Moscow’s ambassador in Washington pointed out that ATACMS “can’t be launched” without targeting information and intelligence supplied by the US, and that such attacks happen whenever American drones loiter over the Black Sea.
The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned US Ambassador Lynne Tracy on Monday morning to answer for Washington’s role in the attack. According to a statement released by the ministry, Russian officials told Tracy that Sunday’s “bloody atrocity” would “not go unpunished.”
The US Embassy in Moscow has yet to comment. When asked for its take on the Ukrainian strike, the Pentagon replied that “we have seen the reports and have nothing to say.”
Meanwhile, Vladimir Zelensky’s adviser Mikhail Podoliak defended the strike – and not for the first time – by claiming there are no civilians in Crimea, only Russian “occupiers.”
Historically a Russian peninsula, Crimea was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR by Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev in 1954. Its population voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia in 2014, following the US-backed coup in Kiev.
