The West should agree to Ukrainian requests for long-range weapons without concern for Russia’s potential reaction, Vladimir Zelensky has said. The Ukrainian leader claimed that Kiev’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region proves that Moscow has no “red lines.”
According to the Defense Ministry in Moscow, Russian forces have killed more than 3,400 Ukrainian troops and destroyed around 400 pieces of military hardware in Kiev’s ongoing cross-border attack. The assault began on August 6 and is the largest of its kind on Russian territory since hostilities erupted between Moscow and Kiev in February 2022.
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Russia has alleged that Ukrainian troops have been using Western-supplied weapons in their operation – claims that have seemingly been supported by reports in the Western media. A number of Kiev’s backers have also publicly given it the green light to use weapons they have provided on Russian soil.
In an address to Ukrainian ambassadors on Monday, Zelensky urged them to “continue convincing our partners to support Ukraine – to the maximum” to make sure they are “in sync with us in their determination.”
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“If our partners lifted all the current restrictions on the use of weapons on Russian territory, we would not need to physically enter particularly the Kursk region to protect our Ukrainian citizens in the border communities,” the Ukrainian leader insisted.
He went on to lament that “for now, we cannot use all the weapons at our disposal and eliminate Russian terrorists where they are.”
Zelensky also called on Kiev’s Western backers not to fear a potential escalation from Moscow. He cited Russia’s supposed inability to defend its territory after Kiev crossed the “strictest of all the red lines that Russia has.” According to the Ukrainian leader, this proves that all of Moscow’s other “red lines” are also “illusory.”
Last Friday, Zelensky took the UK to task for supposedly failing in its support. According to media reports, London has refused to allow Kiev to use Storm Shadow missiles in its offensive in Kursk.
Speaking the same day, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told journalists that “for the first time, Kursk Region was hit by Western-made rockets, most likely from an American HIMARS.”
On Monday, Moscow’s top diplomat, Sergey Lavrov, claimed that “Zelensky would never have decided [to attack Russian territory] if the United States had not instructed him to do this.”