Lavrov: “Russia pushing Ukrainian troops out of Kursk Region, will undoubtedly succeed”
In the cover image a a Russian battle tank T-72 drives outside the town of Sudzha in Russia’s Kursk region
Russia’s army is steadily pushing Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk Region, and will undoubtedly succeed in completing this task, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a roundtable meeting with ambassadors on the Ukrainian issue.
The top Russian diplomat pointed to the fact that NATO member states are talking about this also, behind closed doors. “And there they are promoting ideas that, apparently, it is not quite decent to defend in the public space. We have no such concerns, we have nothing to be embarrassed about,”
Lavrov emphasized. “In addition, today we would like to present you with information on how the war unleashed by the West against Russia using Ukraine as the vessel is unfolding, a war that would be impossible without the supply of huge amounts of Western weapons, ammunition and military equipment. And there are many unfortunate aspects of this situation, but one of them, of course, is the direct involvement of the Ukrainian armed forces, with direct support from the West, in large-scale terrorist actions,” the foreign minister pointed out.
“And the number of targeted attacks on civilian facilities, shootings of civilians is increasing sharply every day. We can see all of this, including within the framework of the terrorist-minded Ukrainian invasion in the Kursk Region, from where they (the Ukrainian military – TASS) are now steadily being pushed out and will be pushed out, no doubt about it,” Lavrov underscored.
The top Russian diplomat also emphasized that “terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure and civilians in the Belgorod and Bryansk regions, as well as periodic launches of attack drones in other border regions of Russia have been going on for more than a year.”
The foreign minister pointed out that “it is the West that supplies Ukraine with offensive weapons that are used in terrorist attacks.”
After the West transfers these weapons, it just looks the other way about how they are used. “[In the West] they say: you know, from the moment the weapons cross the Ukrainian border and the representatives of the Ukrainian armed forces accept them, they cease to be our weapons, they become Ukrainian, and whatever Ukraine wants to do with the use of these weapons. This is what [NATO Secretary General Jens] Stoltenberg, [EU foreign policy chief Josep] Borrell and many other EU and NATO politicians have said,” Lavrov added.
Kremlin: “Reaction to permission to hit Russian territory with Western weapons to follow”
Permission to hit Russian territory would increase the West’s involvement in the conflict in Ukraine and entail a reaction from Moscow, Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with the daily Izvestia.
“There is no need to exaggerate. But, naturally, this raises significantly the degree of the collective West’s involvement in this war around Ukraine. Of course, this will entail a corresponding reaction from Russia,” Peskov warned, commenting on the speculations that the West might make a positive decision on the issue of letting the Ukrainian military use its weapons for strikes deep into Russia.
He emphasized that “this is an attempt to continue the war to the last Ukrainian.”
On Wednesday, the ABC television network quoted a Ukrainian presidential adviser as saying that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky at a meeting in Kiev made no decisions regarding the use of US weapons for strikes deep inside Russia. He said that during the lengthy meeting, Zelensky presented to Blinken a detailed plan for how Kiev could use Western weapons to attack Russian territory and provided a list of possible targets. However, the Ukrainian official added that no decisions had been made on this score.
Earlier, Blinken told a joint news conference in Kiev with British and Ukrainian foreign ministers, David Lammy and Andrey Sibiga, that the United States bore in mind the factor of a possible escalation of the situation in Ukraine due to discussions with the Kiev authorities on strikes with Western weapons deep into Russian territory.
Kiev lost some 7,000 troops in Sudzha district of Kursk Region
Since the start of the incursion into the Kursk Region on August 6. the armed forces of Ukraine lost at least 7,000 troops in the Sudzha district alone, Major General Apty Alaudinov, deputy chief of the Russian Armed Forces’ Main Military-Political Department and commander of the Akhmat special forces commando unit, has told TASS.
“Since the start of this operation in Kursk, the adversary is estimated to have lost around 7,000 troops in our zone of responsibility [Sudzha district] alone,” he said.
The Ukrainian military launched a massive attack on Russia’s borderline Kursk Region on August 6. The Russian Defense Ministry reported on September 11 that over the period of combat operations in the Kursk area, the enemy has lost over 12,200 personnel, 96 tanks, 42 infantry fighting vehicles, 77 armored personnel carriers, 656 armored combat vehicles, 401 motor vehicles, 90 artillery guns, 26 multiple launch rocket systems, including seven HIMARS rocket launchers and five M270 MLRS, eight surface-to-air missile systems, two transporter-loader vehicles, 22 electronic warfare stations and seven counter-battery radar stations, two air-defense radar systems, eight engineering vehicles, among them two obstacle-clearing vehicles and one UR-77 mine-clearing vehicle.
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