Moscow sees sending Western tanks to Ukraine as "extremely dangerous aggression"

Russia reacted on Wednesday to the future arrival of Western tanks in Ukraine with accusations against Kyiv’s allies of attacking Russia and with conviction of the superiority of Russian tanks. The West is not interested in a diplomatic solution to this crisis, says Moscow. The Kremlin believes that the Western claim to achieve peace by arming Ukraine is absurd.

In a harsh statement, the Russian embassy in Berlin called the German decision to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine “extremely dangerous” and went so far as to draw an analogy with World War II, accusing Germany of not wanting to further acknowledge its “responsibility towards Russia” for the crimes of Nazism.

“This extremely dangerous decision takes the conflict to a new level of confrontation and contradicts the statements of German politicians (…) Germany, like its closest allies, is not interested in a diplomatic solution to the Ukrainian crisis, it is ready for its permanent escalation and the unlimited pumping of new lethal weapons to the Kyiv regime,” said the statement, signed by the Russian ambassador, Sergei Nechayev.

The diplomat also brought up the common past history. “The election of Berlin means the final refusal of the Federal Republic of Germany to acknowledge its historical responsibility before our people for the terrible crimes of Nazism during the Great Patriotic War, forgetting the difficult path of post-war reconciliation between Russians and Germans”, assured.

“They will again send battle tanks with German crosses to the ‘Eastern Front’, which will inevitably lead to the deaths of not only Russian soldiers, but also civilians,” he concluded.

On Tuesday Germany bowed to Allied pressure and agreed to send its own Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. In exchange, it was learned that the United States, for its part, will dispatch American Abrams tanks to Kyiv.

Dimitri Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press officer, said Wednesday that the Western idea that Ukraine must be armed to achieve peace does not make sense.

“We see many statements of conviction from a number of politicians, experts, military, etc., who believe that security on the continent can be ensured by continuing the war. This is an absurd belief, it is a dead end for the development of the ideas, both military and political,” the Kremlin spokesman said.

“We were convinced of this a year ago, and even a little over a year ago, when President Putin called on everyone to sit down at the negotiating table and discuss our concerns, when President Putin called on everyone to remember several decades of offensive NATO’s gradual movement towards Russia, and when Putin warned that the continuation of this line could not be without consequences,” he continued.

Peskov also referred Wednesday to the Doomsday Clock, the symbolic doomsday clock created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and was alarmed that his scientists were placing the hands much closer to the hour on Tuesday than ever before. midnight, that is, of the extinction of humanity.

He ignored the fact that in doing so the scientists cited Russia’s “thinly veiled threats” to use nuclear weapons. And he justified his surprise by saying that with “the line that NATO has chosen under the leadership of the United States” there is no prospect of détente. “This imposes a duty on us to be especially careful, to be vigilant and to take appropriate measures,” she added.

Precisely from the United States, the Russian ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Antonov, assured in a message published by on Telegram that the supply of Abrams tanks to Ukraine will be “another flagrant provocation” against Russia.

But he was convinced that the Abrams “will be destroyed” if they reach Ukraine, in the same way that “the rest of NATO’s weaponry” is destroyed.

The Russian deputy Yuri Shvitkin, deputy chairman of the Defense Committee in the Duma, expressed the same line. According to him, to face the Western machines, Russia has the T-90M ‘Proriv’ tank (break, advance, progress, in Russian).

“The (German) Leopard repair base suits tanks with other modifications, and they recover fast enough. These tanks have great firepower. But our T-90M ‘Proriv’ tank outperforms the Leopard,” he said. the deputy in the middle Lenta.ru.

According to Ambassador Antonov, after sending modern battle tanks to Ukrainian territory to stop the Russian intervention, the US will no longer be able to say that it is defending Ukraine. “Justifying this step with ‘defensive weapons’ (supply) arguments will no longer work,” he said.

So, he argued, no one should “have any illusions about who is the real aggressor in this conflict” anymore. For the Russian diplomat, this is the United States, while Russia would be the victim.

“It is clear that Washington is deliberately trying to inflict a strategic defeat on us and gives the ‘green light’ to use US aid to attack Crimea,” Antonov said, referring to the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014.

From the Federation Council (the Russian Senate) its president, Valentina Matviyenko, abounded in the idea that the current conflict is an aggression against Russia and asked the senators for “active patriotism.”

“As always in our history, Russia will stand up to the aggression unleashed against us because the historical and moral truth is on our side. Victory will certainly be ours,” he said in a speech at the opening of the spring session in the Upper House. of the Russian parliament.