As Ukrainian officials warned that Moscow was preparing to launch another wave of missile strikes aimed at destroying the nation’s energy grid, Russia’s foreign minister on Thursday defended Moscow’s attacks, calling the agency’s office in Moscow’s defense. infrastructure are legitimate military targets despite UN warnings that they could amount to war crimes.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei V. Lavrov speaking at a press conference hours after Ukrainian officials said that Russian attacks disabled the power grid in the southern city of Kherson and that six million people across the country remained without power following previous attacks.
Drawing on familiar Kremlin themes that see the Ukraine war as a battle with the West, Lavrov said that Russia is striking targets used to supplement Ukrainian forces with weapons developed by Western nations. Western supplies and Ukrainian forces rely on it to operate. He did not elaborate.
The Ukrainian military says its forces have an autonomous energy supply and the attacks do not affect their combat capabilities.
But the impact on civilians is growing. strikes knocked out electricity and water for millions of people in Ukraine, and Ukrainian and Western officials have accused Russia of trying to make people’s lives miserable by attacking residential areas, power transformers, power plants and other civilian targets. .
“As Ukraine continues to gain momentum on the battlefield, President Putin continues to focus his anger and fire on Ukrainian civilians,” Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said at a meeting of NATO allies in this week. “Heat, water, electricity – for children, the elderly, the sick – these are the new goals of President Putin. He’s hitting them hard. This brutality against the Ukrainian people is barbaric.”
Ukrainian officials say it could take months to repair the damage already done to the power grid, and there is no sign the attacks will stop.
“There remains the threat of missile attacks on critical Ukrainian infrastructure and military installations for the foreseeable future,” said Brig. General Oleksii Hromov, a member of the General Staff of Ukraine, warned on Thursday. “The enemy’s goal is to cause panic among the people.”
Immediately after he spoke, air raid alarms rang across the country, despite a ban followed.
Lavrov said that Russia used high-precision weapons against Ukraine’s energy facilities in support of Kiev’s combat operations and used to “pump Ukraine with Western weapons for it to kill.” Russian”.
He defended Russian attacks on areas of Ukraine that Moscow has illegally annexed and now considers its territory, such as the Kherson region, comparing their attacks to Stalingrad, where was razed in one of the bloodiest battles of World War II when Soviet forces important victory over Nazi Germany.
“Stalingrad is also our territory and we defeated the Germans there to the point that they had to flee,” Lavrov said.
Recalling Russia’s arguments, he accused the United States and Europe of being “directly involved” in the conflict in Ukraine, which, he said, was rooted in NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe and the Western intervention in Ukraine’s affairs.
He also rejected the idea that Moscow was trying to involve Kyiv in the ceasefire talks as a way to buy time and replenish forces amid the defeat on the battlefield. Ukraine’s Foreign Minister, Dmitry Kuleba, warned that a ceasefire would allow “Russia’s exhausted aggressor force to rest before returning for the next invasion.”
“We have never asked for any talks,” Lavrov said. “But we always say that if someone is interested in finding a negotiated solution, we are willing to listen.”
Lavrov also accused NATO of stirring up tensions in other parts of the world, including with China, and trying to draw India into what he called “an anti-Russian and anti-Chinese alliance.” . India and China both have calls for de-escalation after Russian strikes.
