RUSSIA has blamed the US after an attack conducted by the UK and US armed Ukrainian military forces using Washington-supplied cluster munitions killed Russian military correspondent Rostislav Zhuravlev and injured several other journalists.
‘Rostislav died as a result of a Ukrainian armed forces strike with cluster munitions,’ the Russian Embassy in Washington said in a statement on Saturday.
The statement said civilians in residential areas had been targeted by Ukrainian forces, blaming the US for providing Kiev with the widely-banned cluster munitions.
‘Ukrainian radicals use these shells to hit cities and villages of our country, destroying homes of civilians. Kiev receives such weapons from the United States,’ it added.
‘American officials assured the world community that the Ukrainians would use these munitions “selectively and carefully”. The nullity of these words is evident to everyone,’ the statement said.
It further said the use of the cluster bombs against civilians demonstrated that Washington is ‘losing control over its puppets’.
Earlier in the day, the Russian Defence Ministry said Zhuravlev had been killed from injuries caused by a cluster submunition explosion during evacuation in a Ukrainian strike. It also said four journalists received wounds of varying degrees of severity.
According to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, Zhuravlev had been killed near the front-line village of Piatykhatky.
Ukraine, which received cluster bombs from the United States this month, had pledged not to use them in residential areas.
The killing of Zhuravlev was ‘a heinous, premeditated crime’ Kiev committed deliberately, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday. Everything indicates that the attack on the group of journalists was not carried out by chance,’ Zakharova added.
According to the ministry, ‘The journalists were gathering material for a report on the bombing by the Kiev regime militants of settlements in the Zaporozhye region using cluster munitions banned in many countries around the world.’
Meanwhile, the former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter has said that Washington’s decision to provide Ukraine with globally-banned cluster bombs is ‘an act of desperation’.
Ritter said: ‘Ukraine is running out of ammunition and the United States and Europe have not been able to come up with the resources necessary to change that situation.
‘So in an act of desperation, because that is what this is, desperation, the United States has agreed to release its war reserve stocks of the Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions,’ he added.
Ritter made the remarks during an interview with Press TV on Thursday. He pointed to the warning that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg issued last autumn on Ukraine’s running out of ammunition in summer.
The US announced on July 7 it would send Kiev cluster munitions as part of an $800-million security package intended to help Ukrainian forces against Russia, despite concerns over the long-term risk posed to civilians by bomblets that fail to explode.
US President Joe Biden said last week that the decision to provide the munitions was ‘very difficult’, but that Ukrainian forces were ‘running out of ammunition’.
According to Ritter, however, the delivery of the controversial munitions will not be to the benefit of Ukraine.
The US has decided, in contravention of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions as part of the latest military aid package.
Ritter added: ‘The Russians are defeating the Ukrainian military hands down … the whole world is recognising this, and this is why I think you are seeing a drift towards a political solution to this problem because there is no military solution that will come out to the benefit of either NATO or Ukraine or the United States.
He concluded: ‘We have embraced a regime, the Zelensky regime, that has endorsed the ideology of Stepan Bandera, Nazi ideology,’ adding that, ‘this was the ideology that the United States had fought against alongside its Soviet allies.’
