This is Russia’s second warning to the West in a few days. After attacking the United States following a strike in annexed Crimea, the Kremlin threatened the West with “direct confrontation” on Friday, June 28. The reason? “The intensification” of American military drone flights in the Black Sea, off the coast of Ukraine.
Moscow considers that the assistance provided to kyiv in terms of weapons, intelligence collection and identification of targets on Russian territory has made the United States and its allies, members of NATO, parties to the conflict. in Ukraine. American drone flights in the Black Sea “increase the likelihood of incidents in the airspace with aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces, which increases the risk of a direct confrontation between the Alliance and the Russian Federation,” he said. denounced the Russian Ministry of Defense in a press release.
“The NATO countries would be responsible for this,” he warned, adding that Defense Minister Andrei Beloussov had ordered the General Staff “to take measures to respond quickly to provocations “. Because, according to the Russian ministry, American drones are used “for reconnaissance and target designation for precision weapons supplied to the Ukrainian armed forces” by the West.
After having long refused, for fear of provoking an escalation, Americans and Europeans have begun to authorize in recent weeks, under conditions, strikes with Western precision weapons on Russian territory to destroy sites and systems used to bomb Ukraine.
Putin’s repeated threats
Russia had already threatened the United States with retaliation on June 24, accusing it of “killing Russian children”, the day after a strike in Crimea. The attack left four dead, including two children, and more than 150 injured by debris from a missile shot down over a “coastal area”, according to Moscow.
According to the Kremlin, long-range ATACMS missile strikes cannot be carried out by Ukraine alone, as they require specialists, technologies and intelligence collected by the Americans. In Washington, the Pentagon limited itself to saying on Monday that Ukraine “makes its own decisions.” Already, at the beginning of June, citing reprisals, Russian President Vladimir Putin had threatened to deliver equivalent weapons to enemies of the West to attack their interests in other regions of the world.
If the Russian fleet has numerical superiority in the Black Sea, it has lost numerous ships for more than two years, targeted by naval drone attacks successfully launched by kyiv. Thanks to these strikes, the Ukrainian army repelled Russian warships and established a maritime corridor in the area to export its grain. It is now also trying to strike the important military base in Crimea, the rear base of the Russian war effort.
Faced with the Ukrainian strikes, the authorities installed by Moscow in Sevastopol, headquarters of the Russian Black Sea fleet, on Thursday asked each resident to now carry a tourniquet, a medical instrument used to stop hemorrhages.