Putin calls on military to ‘stop Ukrainian bombing of Russia’
Washington: Elie Youssef – Moscow. Paris: «Asharq Al-Awsat»
While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calls on the West for more military aid to confront Russia, US officials said that the United States will announce this week a new military aid package, worth $2.2 billion, that is expected to include long-range missiles.
Reuters reported, quoting officials, that these missiles can hit targets more than 150 km away, which is much more than the 80 km range of the HIMARS missiles that changed the course of the war when Washington sent them last summer.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that the Russian military should stop bombing Russian parts of Ukraine, which he says has left many homeless or without electricity. “The priority task is to exclude the possibility of bombing, but this is the work of the military administration,” Putin said during a government meeting on restoring demolished houses and repairing infrastructure in the regions of southwestern Russia bordering Ukraine.
In a related context, Moscow denounced statements made by French President Emmanuel Macron, on Monday, in which he believed that providing Ukraine with specific weapons does not constitute an escalation of the conflict. “This is absurd,” said Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry. Does the French president really believe that sending heavy weapons and aircraft to the Kyiv regime… will not lead to an escalation of the situation?
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