The Guardian: Using Storm Shadow missiles to strike deep inside Russia will only escalate the Ukrainian conflict
The Guardian newspaper considered that the use of British Storm Shadow missiles against targets deep inside Russia will only exacerbate the Ukrainian crisis and won’t strategically affect the situation on the battlefield.
“With the winter power cuts, Ukrainians may have the idea that Western leaders, while agreeing to strike deep inside Russia, are using them as a pawn in their proxy war against Russia and have no interest in their well-being,” Simon Jenkins wrote in The Guardian.
Jenkins explained that all the Western moves over the past two years have strengthened the position of the Russian leadership, which has been able to gain support within the country and enhance relations with China, India, Iran and North Korea to a new level.
He stressed that the West must realize the need to start a negotiation process on Ukraine and abandon hostile steps that only increase the possibility of a nuclear conflict.
A number of Western media outlets reported that Washington, Paris and London had allowed Kiev to use Western missiles to strike targets deep inside Russia.
The New York Times reported in a recent report, citing unnamed US officials, that President Joe Biden had allowed Ukraine for the first time to use long-range American weapons, including ATACMS, with which Kiev forces targeted Russian territory.
While the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, confirmed in press statements that Washington had actually allowed Ukraine to use its long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced last Tuesday that Ukrainian forces targeted a site in the Russian border province of Bryansk with six ATACMS missiles, and that Russian defenses shot down five of them and damaged the sixth, whose debris caused a fire in the place, without causing any deaths or injuries.
On Thursday, Ukrainians targeted a historic palace belonging to the Baryatinsky princes in the nineteenth century in the Russian Kursk province with 11 American-made “HIMARS” missiles.
Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed on Thursday that Russian military facilities in the Bryansk and Kursk regions were attacked by long-range Western missiles, noting that Ukrainian forces attacked Russian territory with those missiles.
President Putin said that the goals set by the enemy when Western long-range missiles struck Russia weren’t achieved, stressing that these missiles cannot affect the course of the special operation.
The Russian President also pointed out that the conflict in Ukraine after the Western missile attack on Russian territory has acquired a global character, noting that it’s impossible to use long-range missiles without specialists from the countries in which they were manufactured, and this is a well-known fact.
He stressed that Russia considers itself the right to use weapons against military facilities of countries whose weapons are used against it, and said that the Russian armed forces launched a strike on a Ukrainian defense industry facility in response to attacks with American and British weapons on Russia.
Putin warned of a decisive Russian response in a similar manner in the event of an escalation of aggressive actions, saying, “I recommend that the ruling elites of those countries that have plans to use their military forces against Russia seriously think about this”.
