Vengeance Drone - Government Reaction
International law allows Ukraine to strike at Russian territory in self-defense , German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said in response to a question from a DW correspondent about a drone attack on Moscow. However, official Berlin opposes the use of German weapons for such attacks, Hebeshtreit added. "I gave an assessment not to the actual attack [of Ukrainian drones on Moscow], but an assessment from the point of view of international law. International law considers such strikes to be legitimate," he said, when asked if he considers attacks on objects in Russia with Ukrainian weapons legal.
UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly has said that Ukraine has a right to “project force” beyond its borders. Among Ukraine’s Western backers, Britain had led the charge to arm Kiev with long-range weaponry. Speaking to reporters in Estonia on Tuesday, Cleverly said that Ukraine has a “legitimate right to defend itself,” and can “project force beyond its borders to undermine Russia's ability to project force into Ukraine itself.” Striking “legitimate military targets” within Russia is a viable self-defense tactic for Kiev’s forces, Cleverly added.
The EU called on Russia not to escalate its conflict with Ukraine despite the drone attack on Moscow. The bloc’s foreign affairs spokesman, Peter Stano, claimed he did not know all the details of the incident. “We took note of the reports claiming allegedly that there were some drones flying over the region of Moscow. This is not really for us to comment on, we don’t know anything about the origins or about the details of it,” Stano said during a briefing in Brussels. “The only thing I can recall and repeat is the strong call by the EU to Russia not to use such incidents as a pretext for further escalation of its illegal aggression against Ukraine,” the official added.
The administration of US President Joe Biden "privately and publicly made it clear to Ukrainians that it does not support attacks on Russian territory ," said John Kirby, strategic communications coordinator at the White House National Security Council. "We are going to continue to give them (Ukraine. - Ed .) what they need for self-defense and the defense of their territory, Ukrainian land, but we do not support attacks on Russia. We agree that Ukrainians have the right to self-defense - for the last For 15 months we have done almost nothing but help them defend and protect their territory from this Russian aggression.We said that we do not want to encourage or facilitate attacks inside Russia because we do not want the war to escalate beyond the kind of violence that already befallen the Ukrainian people," Kirby said. Separately, he stressed that as soon as the United States supplies any types of weapons to Ukraine, Kyiv "decides for itself what it is going to do with them." "They have assured us that they will not use our equipment to strike Russia. But once it is sent to them, it is theirs," Kirby said.
The relevance of this photo has not been officially confirmed. However, this does not prevent even politicians from commenting on the creative initiative of the unknown. "Thank you to Ana Lorak and Philip Kirkorov for their help in creating drones for today's attack on Moscow," Oleksiy Honcharenko, People's Deputy of Ukraine from the "European Solidarity" faction, wrote on his Telegram channel.
Russian authorities treated the drone attack on Moscow as a war crime, Russian daily Kommersant reported, citing sources familiar with the process. A unit specializing in war crimes, genocide and rehabilitation of Nazism, is working on the case within the country’s investigative committee, the newspaper added. In an article published on 30 May 2023 Kommersant sources claim a criminal probe had been launched into what is being classified as a terrorist attack by the Ukrainian government. The presumed motive was to spread panic among Moscovites. The special war crimes unit tasked with probing the UAV raid has previously investigated instances of Ukrainian shelling of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as recent Ukrainian sorties into Russia’s Bryansk and Belgorod regions, the outlet reported.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
