Kremlin says Biden is ‘inflaming’ tensions with Kiev’s missile decision

The Kremlin on Monday accused US President Joe Biden of escalating the war in Ukraine by allowing Kiev to use long-range missiles supplied by Washington to hit targets in Russia.

The comments from Moscow came as Ukraine said a new Russian attack on the Black Sea port city of Odesa had killed at least eight people and wounded 18, following a massive weekend attack on the country’s creaking energy infrastructure.

Ukraine has long asked Washington for permission to use the powerful Army Tactical Missile System, known by its initials ATACMS, to hit military installations – and in particular airfields – in Russia.

Ukraine says it wants to use the weapons mainly to prevent Russian aerial bombardments that have leveled entire districts and towns near the front line and decimated energy facilities across the country.

A US official speaking on condition of anonymity confirmed to AFP on Sunday the major US policy shift, specifying that the decision was made in response to Russia’s deployment of thousands of North Korean troops to support its war effort.

“It is clear that the outgoing government in Washington intends to take steps to fan the flames and provoke a further escalation of tensions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow.

“If such a decision was actually formulated and announced to the Kiev regime, then of course it is a qualitatively new spiral of tensions and a qualitatively new situation from the point of view of US involvement in the conflict,” Peskov added.

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A Russian rocket attack in the city center of Odesa leaves at least ten dead and 43 injured

President Zelensky called these attacks not random, but demonstration attacks, adding: “Russia is showing its true intentions: only war.”

– ‘Provocation’

He said President Vladimir Putin had clearly expressed Russia’s position in September when the leader said such a move would put NATO “at war” with Russia.

Putin said in September that if Ukraine were to attack Russia with the long-range missiles, Moscow would “make the right decisions based on the threats.”

Peskov said that Putin’s position is that such attacks will ultimately not be carried out by Ukraine, but by the countries that authorize such use of missiles.

The Kremlin spokesman said this was because “the targets are not determined by the Ukrainian army, but by specialists from these Western countries. That fundamentally changes the method of their deployment.”

“That is the danger and the provocative nature of this situation,” he added.

Washington’s decision on the weapons comes weeks after Ukraine warned that North Korea was training and sending thousands of troops to help the Kremlin war in Ukraine, which is nearing its third anniversary.

Kiev has warned that Moscow, together with North Korean soldiers, has amassed a force of 50,000 troops to wrest from the Ukrainian army parts of Russia’s Kursk border region that it has seized.

Ukraine claimed parts of Kursk in a lightning offensive in August, while its forces were thinly spread in the Donetsk region, which has borne the brunt of nearly three years of fighting.

– Eight dead in Odessa –

The Russian Defense Ministry, which has made rapid gains in Donetsk in recent weeks, said it had claimed another village, Novooleksiyivka, in the region where Ukrainian defense lines are buckling under Russian pressure.

The advances came a day after Russia’s latest large-scale drone and missile attack on Ukrainian energy facilities across the country.

A new attack on the port city of Odesa killed at least eight people and injured another 18, regional governor Oleg Kiper wrote on social media.

National grid operator Ukrenergo and Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK said engineers were still repairing damaged facilities in the southern Odessa region after the barrage of missiles and drones.

DTEK said 400,000 households in several regions had been reconnected, but some 321,000 subscribers in the Odesa region were still without power and others in the Black Sea region had no heating or water supply.

Yermak said Monday’s new attack showed that “Russian killers are no longer hiding their intentions,” as details about the attack’s impact continued to emerge.

Ukrenergo also said it had increased imports of electricity from neighboring European countries to make up for the shortfall following the Russian crisis.

The weekend attack, which officials said was one of Moscow’s largest since the invasion in early 2022, came just before the 1,000th day of the war, which will take place at the United Nations on Monday and will be attended by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga .