MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that the Ukraine war was escalating towards a global conflict after the United States and Britain allowed Ukraine to hit Russia with their weapons, and warned the West that Moscow could strike back.

Russia, Putin said, had responded to the use of US and British missiles by firing a new kind of hypersonic medium-range ballistic missile at a Ukrainian military facility. More could follow, Putin warned.

He said civilians would be warned ahead of further strikes with such weapons.

After approval from the administration of President Joe Biden, Ukraine struck Russia with six US-made ATACMS on Nov 19 and with British Storm Shadow missiles and US-made HIMARS on Nov 21, Putin added.

“From that moment, as we have repeatedly underscored, a regional conflict in Ukraine previously provoked by the West has acquired elements of a global character,” Putin said in an address to the nation carried by state television.

The United States, Putin said, was pushing the world towards a global conflict.

“And in case of escalation of aggressive actions, we will also respond decisively and in a mirror manner,” he said.

Putin said the Ukrainian missile attack with ATACMS had failed to inflict any serious damage. But the Storm Shadow attack on Kursk region on Nov 21 had been directed at a command point and led to deaths and injuries, Putin said.

“The use by the enemy of such weapons is not able to change the course of the military actions in the zone of the special military operation,” the Russian president said.

“We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities,” Putin said. “If anyone else doubts this, then they are wrong — there will always be a response.”

Russia controls 18 per cent of Ukraine, including all of Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, 80 per cent of the Donbas — the Donetsk and Luhansk regions — and more than 70 per cent of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, as well just under three per cent of the Kharkiv region and a sliver of Mykolaiv region.

Ukraine and the West say the 2022 invasion was an imperial-style attempt to grab sovereign Ukrainian territory and that they fear Russia could try to attack a Nato member one day if Putin wins in Ukraine.

Putin said Moscow had tested a new medium-range hypersonic non-nuclear ballistic, known as “Oreshnik”, (the hazel) by firing it at a missile and defence enterprise in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, where missile and space rocket company Pivdenmash is based.

He said the attack on the enterprise was successful.

Russia, he added, was developing short and medium range missiles in response to the planned production and then deployment by the United States of medium and shorter range missiles in Europe and the far east.

“I believe that the United States made a mistake by unilaterally destroying the treaty on the elimination of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles in 2019 under a far-fetched pretext,” Putin said, referring to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

The United States formally withdrew from the landmark 1987 INF Treaty with Russia in 2019 after saying that Moscow was violating the accord, an accusation the Kremlin denied.

Putin imposed a unilateral moratorium on the development of missiles previously banned by the INF treaty. He said Russia’s future actions would depend on the West’s actions — and threats against Russia.

“Let me remind you that Russia has voluntarily, unilaterally committed itself not to deploy medium-range and shorter-range missiles until such time as American weapons of this kind appear in any region of the world.”

Published in Dawn, November 22th, 2024