The US has neither “encouraged nor helped” Ukraine to strike targets inside Russia. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this after Moscow accused Kiev of conducting drone strikes on three Russian airports, two of which are hundreds of kilometers from Ukraine.
“We have neither encouraged nor assisted Ukrainians to strike inside Russia, but the important thing to understand is what Ukrainians have been experiencing every day since the Russian invasion of their country began,” Blinken said. accused Russia of “trying to destroy the civilian infrastructure that allows the population to have electricity, heating and water”. A way of “using winter as a weapon, which is the reality of every day and every night in Ukraine”.
The secretary of state then reiterated that Washington’s position is that the Ukrainians have “the necessary equipment to defend themselves, to defend their territory and their freedom”.
Vladimir Putin has repeatedly warned the United States that it considers supplying Kiev with weapons capable of striking Russian territory a “red line” not to be crossed. Washington has always excluded long-range missiles from its supplies, and in recent days it was revealed that the Pentagon secretly modified the Himars rocket launchers delivered to Kiev precisely to prevent them from being used to strike inside Russia.
But speaking alongside Blinken, Defense Secretary Lioyd Austin said the US is not preventing Ukraine from developing its own long-range missiles. “The answer is no, we’re definitely not doing that,” Austin said.
Russia has ordered hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles from Iran. This is what a diplomatic source at the United Nations reveals. “We know that Iran is preparing to increase deliveries of drones and missiles to Russia in significant quantities,” the source told dpa, recalling that, after more than months of conflict in Ukraine, Russia has a serious problem of exhaustion of the stocks of its war arsenals.
“I don’t think they’ve been sent yet, but they’ve clearly been ordered,” the source adds. Moscow has already used hundreds of Iranian-made Shahed 136 drones, also called kamikaze drones, because they are ‘disposable’, even if it has always denied this. While in November Tehran admitted to having supplied drones to Russia.
