Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a parade to mark Navy Day in St. Petersburg, Russia, July 31, 2022. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov
LONDON, Aug 2 (Reuters) – Russia said on Tuesday that the United States, the world’s largest military power, was directly involved in the conflict in Ukraine because American spies approved and coordinated Ukrainian missile strikes on Russian forces.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked the most serious crisis in relations between Russia and the West since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when many people feared the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
The Russian Defense Ministry, headed by a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, said Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, admitted to the Telegraph that Washington was coordinating the HIMARS missile strikes.
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“All this irrefutably proves that Washington, contrary to the claims of the White House and the Pentagon, is directly involved in the conflict in Ukraine,” the defense ministry said.
US President Joe Biden has said he wants Ukraine to defeat Russia and has supplied Kiev with billions of dollars in weapons, but US officials do not want a direct confrontation between US and Russian troops. On the same subject : LeBron James criticizes US efforts to bring Brittney Griner home from Russia.
Russia has said the Biden administration is responsible for missile attacks on civilian targets in areas controlled by Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.
“It is the Biden administration that is directly responsible for all missile attacks authorized by Kiev on residential areas and civilian infrastructure in populated areas of the Donbass and other regions, which resulted in mass civilian deaths,” the defense ministry said.
Russia and the West frame the conflict in Ukraine very differently.
Putin calls it a “special military operation” aimed at preventing what he says is an attempt by the West to use Ukraine to threaten Russia and protect Russian speakers from persecution by dangerous nationalists in Ukraine.
The 69-year-old head of the Kremlin increasingly interprets the conflict as an existential battle with the West, the outcome of which will reshape the global political order.
Kiev and its Western supporters say Putin’s claims are baseless and that there is no justification for waging an unprovoked war against a sovereign state whose borders Russia has recognized.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who sometimes vacations with Putin in the Russian wilderness, said the operation in Ukraine would be planned so that Russian and Russian-backed forces would push back Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donetsk region.
“After taking control of the territory of the Lugansk People’s Republic, the Donetsk People’s Republic is being liberated according to plan,” Shoigu told senior generals.
He said that the settlements of Hryhorivka, Berestovo, Strijapivka, Pokrovske, Semyhirya and Novoluhanske, including the largest thermal power plant in Europe, were recently occupied.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine discloses their losses.
US intelligence estimates that around 15,000 Russians have been killed in Ukraine so far – equal to the total number of Soviet casualties during Moscow’s 1979-1989 occupation of Afghanistan.
Ukrainian losses are probably slightly lower than that, according to US intelligence, according to US estimates. Neither Ukraine nor Russia provided detailed estimates of their own losses.
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Reuters reporting; edited by Guy Faulconbridge and Nick Macfie
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