THE RUSSIAN Foreign Ministry has summoned the British ambassador and warned London of ‘dangerous consequences’, following a Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow’s Black Sea fleet in Crimea last week.
Russia says the UK provided support to Kiev to carry out the attack.
‘Such confrontational actions of the English carry a threat of escalation of the situation and could lead to unpredictable and dangerous consequences,’ the ministry said in a statement on Thursday.
Stressing that Moscow had delivered a ‘strong protest’ to UK ambassador Deborah Bronnert in the wake of the attack, the Russian Foreign Ministry said it had handed ‘concrete facts’ of London’s ‘hostile provocations’ to her and that ‘a demand was put forward to stop them immediately’.
The ministry said British forces were training Ukrainian special services in the southern city of Ochakiv for ‘sabotage operations at sea’, adding that the training also included preparing ‘underwater saboteurs for operations in the waters of the Black and Azov seas’.
Russia accused Britain on Saturday of helping Ukraine to conduct a drone attack on its ships in the Crimean port of Sevastopol, with the UK dismissing the allegations as ‘false claims on an epic scale’.
The Russian military said its ships had been targeted in a drone attack in the bay of Sevastopol.
The Russian Defence Ministry said in a statement the ‘preparations of this terrorist act … were carried out under the guidance of British specialists located in the city of Ochakiv in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region.’
The ministry said ‘the ships of the Black Sea Fleet that were attacked by terrorists are involved in ensuring the security of the ‘grain corridor’ as part of an international initiative to export agricultural products from Ukrainian ports.’
The defence ministry also said that in response to the drone attacks, Russia was suspending its participation in the deal that allowed grain exports from Ukraine.
The Russian fleet stationed in the port had also been attacked by a drone in July.
Crimea joined the Russian Federation in a referendum in 2014.
Russia launched its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine in late February, following Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the 2014 Minsk agreements and Moscow’s recognition of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Since the onset of operations, the US and its European allies have imposed waves of sanctions on the Kremlin and sent numerous batches of advanced weapons to Ukraine. Moscow has been critical of the weapons supplies to Kiev, warning that they will prolong the war.
- Russia has repeatedly complained to the UN about the US’s ‘military-biological activities’ in Ukraine and has urged the UNSC to launch a probe into them.
The Chinese envoy to the United Nations says Beijing is ‘gravely concerned’ about the allegations made by Russia that the United States is conducting bio-military activities in Ukraine, calling on the international community to pay ‘full attention’ to the issue.
‘Russia has repeatedly launched allegations to the UN Security Council that the United States is suspected of conducting bio-military activities in Ukraine. China is gravely concerned,’ China’s Deputy Representative to the UN Geng Shuang told the Security Council on Wednesday.
‘We believe that any evidence of clues related to compliance with the convention (on biological weapons) should receive full attention from the international community and deserves thorough and to-the-point responses and clarifications by the party concerned,’ the Chinese envoy said.
He said that Beijing believed that a fair and transparent investigation by the UNSC could effectively address compliance concerns and help uphold the authority and effectiveness of the convention.
Russia submitted a draft resolution plus a 310-page document to the Security Council last week, urging members to vote for launching an investigative committee to probe Moscow’s allegations that Washington is developing biological weapons in Ukraine outside the framework of the convention against the use of biological weapons.
On Wednesday, the Security Council rejected the draft resolution, with Russia and China casting the only votes in favour of an investigation. The US, France, and Britain, which have veto powers, voted against it. All the 10 non-permanent members of the UNSC abstained.
Russia alleged that the US has biological warfare labs in Ukraine soon after it began a military offensive against Ukraine. Both Washington and Kiev rejected the allegation.
- US President Joe Biden says American troops stationed on a temporary basis in Poland will stay in the country ‘for a long time’, in a move that would clearly violate a 25-year-old treaty between NATO and Russia.
Asked by reporters how long he would continue to keep additional US troops in Poland and other NATO member countries, Biden responded on Wednesday, ‘They’ll be there for a long time.’
It is unknown how many US troops are currently stationed in Poland, NATO’s main logistical hub for supporting Ukraine in an ongoing military conflict with Russia.
Earlier this year, the US ambassador in Warsaw revealed that over 12,600 American military personnel were in the country, the largest number in history.
But keeping the troops ‘for a long time’ would come in direct violation of the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, under which the US-led alliance is committed to carrying out its collective defence and other missions by ‘ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces’ on the territories of the former Warsaw Pact states.
Twenty-five years on, the treaty is considered a dead letter by Warsaw, which accused Moscow of making it void by its ‘invasion’ of Ukraine in late February.
Polish President Andrzej Duda’s foreign policy adviser Jakub Kumoch, said last month that Washington should permanently station troops and even nuclear weapons on Polish territory.
Russia has long expressed grievances to the United States about NATO’s eastward expansion. NATO, however, has sharply increased its presence at its eastern border, with some 40,000 troops spread from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has on several occasions cited the post-Soviet expansion of NATO eastwards as a reason for Russia’s current military operation in Ukraine.
