Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday threatened to further escalate the war in Ukraine in light of Western countries’ continued military assistance to the former Soviet state, warning the U.S. and other countries against providing long-range rocket systems capable of hitting targets in Russia.
A shipment of such weapons would prompt Russian forces to target “objects that we haven’t yet struck,” saidPutin during a televised interview.
The Russian president made the remarks as follows at least five airstrikesAfter weeks of relative calm in Kiev, fighting continued in eastern Donbas.
Ukraine denied claims by Russia that it had destroyed tanks sent by Western countries, with the country’s railroad chief saying the Russians had attacked grain wagons — further threatening food supplies for the rest of the world.
Russia stated that it struck tanks donated by Ukraine’s eastern European allies in its airstrikes on Kyiv.
But Ukraine’s railway chief says they actually attacked grain wagons – a crucial lifeline for the world’s food during Russia’s Black Sea port blockade.https://t.co/cid8hgt92T
— max seddon (@maxseddon) June 5, 2022
Last week, the U.S. declared that it had approved a $700million security assistance package for Ukraine. This included four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems that can strike Russian targets up to 50 miles away.
AsCommon Dreams reported on Tuesday, peace groups including CodePink, which has consistently advocated for the U.S. to lead efforts to negotiate a peaceful settlement between Russia and Ukraine, warned that the decision to arm the Ukrainians with a more advanced missile system added “fuel to the fire deliberately.”
Putin on Sunday asserted the delivery of increasingly advanced Western weapons “has only one goal: To drag out the armed conflict as much as possible.”
Analysts and peace advocates sayNow past its 100th birthday, the conflict has descended into a proxy war between NATO-Moscow with no end in view.
The Biden administration said last week that it had provided the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems to Ukraine after getting assurances that the country would not use the weapons to attack inside Russia, but Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CodePink, said the shipment represented “the slippery slope leading to a direct U.S. confrontation with Russia.”
Meanwhile, Energoatom, Ukraine’s state-run agency that operates its four nuclear power stations, warned that a Russian cruise missile “flew critically low” over the Pivdennoukrainsk nuclear plant near the city of Yuzhnoukrainsk on Sunday morning.
Russian forces “still do not understand that even the smallest fragment of a missile that can hit a working power unit can cause a nuclear catastrophe and radiation leak,” the agency said.
CNN reportedSaturday saw the U.S. and its allies meet regularly to discuss the end of the war through a negotiation. Officials discussed one proposal to Ukraine, which was to stay out of NATO in return for security assurances and to negotiate with Russia over the future of Crimea.
Ukraine is focused on winning a decisive victory in the eastern and southern regions and is unlikely to support any deal “that cedes territory,” one official told CNN.
Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General said that while “almost all wars end at some stage at the negotiating table,” officials “have to be prepared for the long haul… because what we see is that this war has now become a war of attrition.”