US must rein in ‘terrorist client’ Ukraine – Moscow
The US must stop the flow of weapons to Ukraine after American-supplied arms were used to strike schools, hospitals, and homes in Russia, Moscow’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, has said.
The senior diplomat was referring to strikes on civilians during Kiev’s attempted incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region this week. According to the regional governor, Ukrainians deliberately attacked non-military targets, even hitting an ambulance with a kamikaze drone and killing the driver and a paramedic. The Russian Defense Ministry listed Western-donated weapons among those destroyed in repelling the Ukrainian forces.
Antonov joined other Russian officials in describing the Ukrainian operation as “terrorist,” stressing in a statement on Wednesday that contrary to Western claims, Kiev’s actions cannot be justified by the right to self-defense.
“Washington should stop supplying arms to Kiev and yank the chain of the neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian army,” he said. So far, remarks by American officials on the issue have been “outrageous,” since they failed to sympathize with the civilian victims of “their clients,” he added.
The Russian military estimates that Kiev deployed some 1,000 troops in the attempted incursion on Tuesday morning and has lost roughly a third of them since, including 100 killed in action. The US government has distanced itself from the operation.
“We intend to reach out to our Ukrainian partners to get a fuller picture of what happened,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby told journalists on Wednesday. He stressed that Washington’s policy on how Kiev can use US-donated weapons “has not changed in any way.”
Officials have said that the arms are being supplied on the condition that they would not be used outside of what the US recognizes as Ukrainian territory. An exemption was announced earlier this year for locations along the border, in case of the imminent threat of Russian attacks.
The claimed limitation was never fully observed, as evidenced by the Ukrainian use of Western hardware during an incursion into Belgorod Region in May 2023. Photo evidence confirmed the loss of two M1151A1 Humvee vehicles as well as two M1224 MaxxPro vehicles on Russian soil in that raid. The operation was conducted by a Kiev-backed militia force, which was armed with Czech and Belgian small arms.
