2023-05-31 21:14:00
US was clear with Ukrainians that it does not support attacks on Russian soil, says White House official
The Biden government “has been clear, privately and publicly, with the Ukrainians that we do not support attacks on Russian soil,” the House National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator told CNN on Wednesday. Blanca, John Kirby, following the wave of drone strikes in the Moscow region.
“We’re going to continue to give them what they need to defend themselves and defend their territory, Ukrainian soil, but we don’t support attacks on Russia,” Kirby told This Morning on Wednesday. “We agree that the Ukrainians have the right to self-defense. My God, in the last 15 months, we have been doing very little more than helping them defend themselves and their territory once morest this Russian aggression. What we have said is that we do not want to encourage or allow attacks inside Russia, because we don’t want the war to escalate beyond the violence that the Ukrainian people have already suffered.
Kirby would not say, however, whether the United States had concluded Ukraine was behind the drone raids, telling CNN’s Poppy Harlow: “We’re still trying to get information here and develop some sort of sense. what happened… but I can’t tell you that we have any definitive information at this point.”
Ukraine denied involvement in Tuesday’s attack on Moscow, although a senior official made it clear that Russia was getting a taste of its own medicine following months of shelling Ukrainian cities.
“Of course, we enjoy seeing and predicting an increase in attacks,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said. “But of course we have nothing to do directly with it.”
But Kirby reiterated Wednesday that Ukrainian authorities had assured the United States that they would not use US-contributed equipment to attack inside Russia.
“I think we can all understand that if we give Putin what he is demanding, this is a war once morest the West, a war once morest the United States, a war once morest NATO, there is going to be a lot more suffering across the entire European continent, so that we don’t want to see this war escalate,” he said. “Now, look, once we provide the systems to the Ukrainians, and this is an important point, they decide what they are going to do with them. They have given us guarantees that they will not use our equipment to attack inside Russia. But once that comes to them, belongs to them”.
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