Russia's outgoing US ambassador issues 'nuclear catastrophe' warning as he returns to Moscow
11 October 2024, 10:13
America will face a "head-on collision with a nuclear power" if it allows Ukraine to fire US long-range missiles into Russia.
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Outgoing ambassador Anatoly Antanov said that US-Russian relations that are already at "arguably the lowest point in their history" will plunge into an "uncontrolled nosedive" if Ukraine is given the go-ahead to use the weapons.
Read More: President Zelenskyy visits UK for talks with Keir Starmer
Yesterday Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met Keir Starmer to discuss the two-and-a-half year war. Last month, Zelenskyy told President Biden that firing US ATACMS deep into Russian territory could break the deadlock.
Russia's President Putin said it would finally constitute direct NATO involvement.
Antanov, who is leaving Washington after seven years as ambassador, said: "America will not be able to sit it out across the ocean. A global nuclear catastrophe would affect everyone."
US missiles were first used against Russian forces in Ukraine in early April but the US has still to announce a decision on whether it will allow Kyiv to fire them over the border.
In recent weeks Russia has seized a number of Ukrainian villages while Ukraine carried out a cross-border raid that seized 500 square miles of Russian territory.
Antonov told Newsweek said: "Project Ukraine is dragging American politicians only further into an abyss, from which it is increasingly difficult to get out."
"As we see, the administration can only respond to the victories of Russian troops in Donbas and the failure of the provocation by the Ukrainian armed forces in the Kursk region by using the same hackneyed theses about 'support as long as we can'.
"There are zero signals to clients about the need to think over their position and sit down at the negotiating table.
"Neither are there any hints about stopping the senseless flow of weapons at the expense of the local taxpayer.
"Washington is continuing a dangerous discussion about the possibility of giving Ukrainians a permission to strike deep into Russian territory with Western long-range missiles."
Antonov claimed that Russia's warnings had been met with "silence and smirks' in the West."
He added: "In America, there is an unwillingness to recognize that over the past few decades, the West, led by Washington, has been rejecting Moscow's outstretched hand of cooperation again and again.
"Year after year, it has been militarily exploiting European territory, conducting waves of NATO expansion to the East.'It has organized color revolutions and anti-constitutional coups, increasingly encircling Russia in a hostile ring, and as the decisive battering ram it chose Ukraine.
"All this only confirms that the political elites have set themselves the task not just to defeat Russia but to preserve the old world order, based on the rules favorable to NATO countries.
"We want to change this obviously outdated state of affairs. We want our security interests to be taken into account."
Russia and Ukraine appear locked in a grinding stalemate as the conflict heads towards its fourth year. Both counties touting their own irreconcilable peace plans.
Kyiv has demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Crimea, other occupied areas, and from the eastern Donbass region which has been controlled by Russian separatists since 2014.
Putin has demanded Ukraine give up the Crimea and the Donbas and abandon its bid for Nato membership as a prerequisite to peace talks.
