On the 1,000th day of the war, Moscow promised an “appropriate” response after the attack carried out by Ukraine on its soil during the night from Monday to Tuesday and announced that the possibilities of resorting to nuclear weapons were thus expanded, a rhetoric denounced by Westerners.
“It’s not enough to survive”
While on the ground, Russian troops are advancing on several sectors of the front, kyiv and its European allies are worried about the consequences of the return to power on January 20 of Donald Trump, very skeptical of the billions that the administration of current President Joe Biden has granted grants to Ukraine since the Russian invasion began in February 2022.
“If they cut (the aid), I think we will lose,” the Ukrainian leader said in an interview on Fox News, the conservatives' favorite American channel. “Of course, in any case, we will stay, we will fight. We have our production. But it's not enough to win. And I think that’s not enough to survive,” he added, emphasizing the importance of “unity” between Ukraine and the United States.
A senior U.S. official said the United States would also provide Ukraine with “non-persistent antipersonnel mines” – that is, those equipped with a self-destruct or self-deactivation device to prevent them from being released. pose a danger for generations after the end of the war – to strengthen its defenses against the Russian invasion.
Fear of an escalation
During his campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to quickly end the war, without specifying how. On Monday, his bodyguards even denounced an “escalation” or even a risk of “world war three” after Joe Biden’s decision to authorize Ukraine to strike on Russian territory with long-range American-made missiles.
After the announcement of this green light on Sunday, the Ukrainian attack on Tuesday morning, according to the Russian army, targeted military installations in the Bryansk region, not far from the Ukrainian border. Five projectiles were destroyed. These shots were confirmed by a Ukrainian official speaking on condition of anonymity, even if the head of state Zelensky limited himself to saying that his country had these missiles and was going to “use them”.
The head of Russian diplomacy Sergei Lavrov, for his part, judged, on the sidelines of the G20 in Rio, that this sent “a signal” according to which Ukraine and the West “want escalation”. This is “a new phase in the Western war against Russia and we will react accordingly,” he insisted. For him, these precise missiles supplied by the United States cannot be used by kyiv “without the help of American experts and instructors”.
“Strategic defeat”
In response, Mr. Lavrov invited Westerners to “read the entirety” of the new Russian nuclear doctrine, made official on Tuesday by Vladimir Putin, which expands the possibility of using atomic weapons in the event of a “massive” attack. by a non-nuclear country but supported by a nuclear power. A clear reference to Ukraine and the United States.
The Russian president has not yet spoken publicly about the Ukrainian attack on Tuesday morning but his spokesperson Dmitri Peskov, in an interview with the Ria-Novosti agency, accused the West of wanting to cause “a strategic defeat” of Russia and to “use Ukraine as an instrument” for this.
Ukraine has been demanding for months to be able to strike military targets deep in Russia to disrupt the logistics of its army, now supported by thousands of North Korean soldiers, according to kyiv and the West. Facing the Ukrainian Parliament, Volodymyr Zelensky estimated that the outcome would come in 2025 and recognized that Ukraine might have to wait until after Putin to “reestablish” its territorial integrity, with Russian forces occupying nearly 20% of its surface area.
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