The Kremlin has said Joe Biden’s outgoing administration wants to escalate the conflict in Ukraine by allowing Kyiv to use long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia.
Several US outlets reported on Sunday that the Biden administration has decided to allow Ukraine to conduct strikes with US-made weapons deep into sovereign Russian territory.
“It is clear that the outgoing administration in Washington intends to take steps to continue to add fuel to the fire and to further inflame tensions around this conflict,” Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on Monday.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had long pushed for authorisation from Washington to use the powerful Army Tactical Missile System, known by its initials Atacms, to hit targets inside Russia.
Peskov said Putin had expressed Russia’s position clearly in September when the Russian leader warned that the move to let Kyiv use longer-range weapons against targets inside Russia would mean Nato would be directly “at war” with Moscow.
Without going into specifics, Putin said at the time Moscow would “take the appropriate decisions based on the threats that we will face”.
On Monday, Russian officials similarly pledged that Moscow would react to President Biden’s decision, though they did not elaborate on what that response might entail.
Leonid Slutsky, chairman of Russia’s ultranationalist Liberal Democratic party of Russia, said the US was now directly participating in the military conflict in Ukraine.
“This will inevitably entail the toughest response from Russia, based on the threats that will be posed to our country,” he added.
The US decision is being justified by the presence of North Korean troops fighting alongside Russia against Ukraine. Though there was no public comment from the White House, the story first appeared in coordinated briefings to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the news agencies Reuters and Associated Press. Their use will be limited to the Kursk region, where Ukraine launched an incursion into Russia in the summer.
There were more Russian threats issued on state media, with the prominent propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov saying the west was directly entering the war “with all the ensuing consequences for their own territories and those inhabiting them”.
“The response could be anything. Anything,” Kiselyov said.
The Russian lawmaker Maria Butina said the US was risking a third world war and expressed hopes that the president-elect, Donald Trump, would reverse the decision.
after newsletter promotion
“These guys, Biden’s administration, is trying to escalate the situation to the maximum while they still have power and are still in office,” Butina said.
“I have a great hope that Trump will overcome this decision if this has been made because they are seriously risking the start of World War Three which is not in anybody’s interest,” she added.
The Kremlin-friendly Rossiyskaya Gazeta wrote Ukraine’s ability to strike inside Russia with western weapons would “create additional challenges for our military” but added that the decision would not “change the course of war”.
The influential outlet said one of the ways Russia might respond was to provide weapons for Yemen’s Houthi rebels to target US ships in the Red Sea.
In the summer, Putin had suggested that Moscow could supply long-range weapons to other countries with the aim of attacking western targets.
“If someone thinks it is possible to supply such weapons to a war zone to attack our territory and create problems for us, why don’t we have the right to supply our weapons,” Putin told a press conference in St Petersburg.