MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that an attack on Russia’s Bryansk region by Ukraine using U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles was a clear signal that the West wanted to escalate the Ukraine conflict.
“The fact that ATACMS were used repeatedly in the Bryansk region overnight is, of course, a signal that they want escalation,” Lavrov, speaking in Rio de Janeiro, told reporters.
“Without the Americans, it is impossible to use these high-tech missiles, as Putin has repeatedly said,” Lavrov said.
Putin said on Sept. 12 that Western approval for such Ukrainian strikes would mean “the direct involvement of NATO countries, the United States and European countries in the war in Ukraine” because NATO military infrastructure and personnel would have to be involved in the targeting and firing of the missiles.
Russia said on Tuesday that Ukraine had fired six U.S.-made ATACMS missiles into its western Bryansk region.
Lavrov said he hoped Moscow’s new nuclear doctrine, in which President Vladimir Putin lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike, would be attentively read.
(Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge and Lucy Papachristou; editing by Andrew Osborn)
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