An ambassador for Vladimir Putin issued an unusual plea to US politicians last night over the Ukraine war.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is at the UN in New York this week, asking for more support from the West and for permission to use UK-made long-range missiles to strike beyond Russian borders.
The Russian ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, did not directly acknowledge Zelenskyy’s visit in a post on his embassy’s Telegram channel, but appealed for the States to go easy on Moscow.
He said: “We call on American politicians to come to their senses. To understand that the Russian Federation will never back down from the demand to take into account its national interests.
“As history has proven, missiles and bombs will not break us. Terrorists and fascists will be destroyed, and our land will be liberated.”
Yet, in the same post, he repeated the baseless Russian claim that Kyiv is full of Nazis and suggested the States has become a “de facto party” to the conflict, despite America’s reluctance to authorise the use of the long-range missiles.
According to a translation on the Russian state news agency website, TASS, Antonov said: “The United States, by providing assistance to Ukrainian Nazis and inciting them to criminal provocations such as the invasion of the Kursk region, has long become a de facto party to the conflict.
“They seek to distort the truth with statements that Russia does not want peace and has not tried to achieve it.
“However, it is Washington that needs hatred and combat clashes between fraternal peoples. For one purpose only – the strategic defeat of our country.”
The Kremlin seems to have gone into overdrive this week to try and deter the West from getting any more involved in the war.
Putin has been reminding Ukrainian allies of his nuclear arsenal by claiming he is reviewing Russia’s rules around using the weapons while his top diplomat Sergei Lavrov slammed the UN for not acting after Ukraine took around 1,000 sq km of Russian land in Kursk.
For context, Russia is currently occupying around 100,000 sq km – that’s 18% of Ukraine’s entire territory.