Troops on the Ukrainian border. /
The Kremlin assures that its country is “ready” to minimize the consequences of new sanctions imposed by the United States
The Russian authorities have expressed this Wednesday that they do not rule out a military operation by Ukraine in the near future to “snatch” the Crimean peninsula, which the country annexed in 2014.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dimitri Peskov, has pointed out that “Ukraine considers it possible to attack Russia to, for example, invade the Russian region of Crimea (…) given the nationalist elements, not only among the grassroots, but also at the top, in government”. “This cannot be ruled out,” he has said.
According to the spokesman, Ukraine’s national security strategy is directly related to the use of force to recover the territories. Since the annexation, Moscow has withdrawn that the inhabitants of Crimea decided to annex in a “democratic” way and in full compliance with International Law and the UN Charter.
Thus, the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, has affirmed that the issue of Crimea “is definitively settled”, according to the Sputnik news agency.
This same Wednesday, the Kremlin has indicated that Russia is “ready” to minimize the consequences of new sanctions imposed by the United States. “We have plans to cover the risks, to minimize the consequences of such unforeseeable actions,” he asserted.
In addition, he added that the Kremlin is concerned about Washington’s “unpredictable behavior in terms of sanctions” and stressed that this “unpredictability” persists at the international level.
“But, again, we call on the United States to abandon provocative actions and refuse to stir up tensions on the European continent,” the spokesman said. Since the beginning of this year, Moscow has been negotiating with Washington a credible and binding agreement on reciprocal security guarantees.
Russia demands the renunciation of the expansion of NATO, the deployment of offensive weapons near its borders and the withdrawal of troops and war material from Bulgaria and Romania. The United States has deployed missiles in the Polish town of Redzikowo, about 180 kilometers from the Russian province of Kaliningrad, as well as in the Romanian town of Deveselu, about 600 kilometers from the Crimean peninsula.
The Russian and Ukrainian authorities have been raising their political pulse in recent weeks with crossed accusations about an imminent military offensive, in a new uptick in the tension that has existed since the separatist rebellion began in Donbas in 2014.
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