Russia has accused the US of killing people in Crimea and promises a response
The Russian Federation blamed the United States for the fallout from a missile attack on Sevastopol in occupied Crimea on Sunday, which officials said killed four people, including two children. About 150 others were injured in the attack, when debris from the missile landed on a nearby beach.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said the missiles used by Ukraine were US-supplied ATACMS missiles, and claimed they were programmed by American specialists.
Kremlin spokesman Dmytro Peskov called the strike “barbaric” and accused the US of “murdering Russian children.” He drew attention to the comments of President Vladimir Putin, who recently promised to target his missiles at countries that supply weapons to Ukraine.
Moscow said Sunday’s casualties and injuries were caused by falling debris after its air defenses in Crimea intercepted five rockets with cluster warheads fired by Ukrainian forces.
Footage released by Russian state television showed chaos on the beach in the Uchkiivka area, as people fled from falling debris and some injured people were carried out on deckchairs. The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that all ATACMS missiles are programmed by American specialists and guided by American satellites.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated that statement during a meeting in Minsk on Monday, saying the system “cannot be used without the direct involvement of the US military, including satellite capabilities.”
The US has supplied ATACMS missiles to Ukraine for more than a year. According to manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the system allows Ukrainian forces to hit targets at a distance of up to 300 km (186 miles).
Moscow illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, and only a few countries recognize the peninsula as Russian territory. Therefore, according to American experts, it does not fall under the demands of the United States that Ukraine refrain from using weapons provided by Washington for strikes on the territory of Russia.
A spokesman for the White House National Security Council told the BBC:
“Ukraine makes its own decisions regarding goals and conducts its own military actions.”
At the same time, Peskov told journalists that “the involvement of the United States, as a result of which peaceful Russian residents die, cannot be without consequences. Time will tell what will happen.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia summoned the US ambassador Lynn Tracy, to whom Lavrov said that the involvement of the US in the attack “doesn’t raise doubts”.
Moscow has repeatedly threatened to attack countries that supply weapons to Ukraine, claiming they are legitimate military targets.
Earlier this month, Putin promised to target countries arming Ukraine during a meeting with international news agencies.
“If someone thinks it’s possible to deliver such weapons to a war zone to attack our territory and create problems for us, why don’t we have the right to deliver weapons of the same class to regions of the world where sensitive targets of these (Western) will be struck countries? That is, the answer may be asymmetric. We will think about it.” he said.
Ukrainian officials defended the strike after the attack, calling Crimea a legitimate target. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelenskyi, said the peninsula was in fact “a large military camp, which he said contains “hundreds of direct military targets that the Russians are cynically trying to hide and cover with their own civilians.”
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine says at least 10,000 civilians have been killed since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The real figure, officials told the BBC, is likely to be much higher.