London is more aggressive than Washington with its actions in the Ukraine conflict, the Russian foreign minister has claimed
Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (C) gives a Union Jack flag to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and other Kiev officials. © AFP / AFP / Stefan Rousseau
Britain is behaving even more aggressively than the US with its actions in the Ukraine conflict, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.
Washington and its allies have always viewed Ukraine as an “anti-Russian foothold,” Lavrov claimed on Friday at a conference in Moscow dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the Western-backed coup in Kiev.
The Ukraine conflict is “another result of the ‘divide and conquer’ policy, the policy of pitting different countries and peoples against each other, of provoking interstate conflicts,” the diplomat insisted.
This policy “has long been pursued in various regions of the world by the West, led by the US or more precisely by the Anglo-Saxons,” he stated, referring to the Americans and the British.
“The role that the UK is playing in the current events is, of course, even more aggressive, more elaborate in its provocative assertiveness than of any other participant, including even the US,” Lavrov alleged.
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The British Defense Ministry announced on Thursday that it will be co-leader of a ‘drone coalition’ aimed at supplying Ukraine with 1 million UAVs to fight Russia. The UK will allocate £200 million ($250 million) to the cause, it added.
In January, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged to provide another £2.5 billion ($3.2 billion) in military assistance to Ukraine over the next financial year. The announcement was made ahead of Sunak’s visit to Kiev, during which he and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed a bilateral security cooperation agreement.
In his interview with independent US journalist Tucker Carlson last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said it was “ridiculous and very sad” that the authorities in Kiev “obeyed the demand or persuasion” by then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to withdraw from peace talks with Moscow in April 2022, just over a month after the outbreak of the conflict. The Russian leader added that reports of Johnson’s involvement were confirmed last year by Kiev’s top negotiator, David Arakhamia.
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Throughout the conflict between Moscow and Kiev there have been reports about members of Britain’s special services, the SAS, allegedly secretly operating in Ukraine. The Defense Ministry in Moscow has also accused “British experts” of helping to prepare naval drone attacks against Russia’s Crimean Peninsula.
