The Kremlin accused US President Joe Biden on Monday of escalating the war in Ukraine by allowing Kyiv to use long-range missiles supplied by Washington to strike targets inside Russia.
The comments came as Moscow unleashed a second missile attack in as many days on the UNESCO-listed Ukrainian city of Odesa on the Black Sea, killing 10 and wounding more than 40.
Kyiv has long sought authorisation from Washington to use the powerful Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, to hit military installations inside Russia as its troops come under growing pressure.
Ukraine says strikes in Russia will help it prevent aerial bombardments that have levelled entire districts of towns near the front line and decimated energy facilities across the country.
“It’s obvious that the outgoing administration in Washington intends to take steps in order to continue fuelling the fire and provoke a further escalation of tensions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
A US official earlier confirmed the major policy shift to AFP, saying it was in response to Russia’s deployment of thousands of North Korean troops to aid its war effort.
Peskov said this marked a “new spiral of tensions and a qualitatively new situation from the point of view of the US’s engagement in the conflict.”
‘At war’
He said President Vladimir Putin had expressed Moscow’s position clearly in September when the Russian leader said such a move would put NATO “at war” with Russia.
Back then Putin said that if Ukraine were to attack Russia with long-range missiles, Moscow would “take the appropriate decisions based on the threats”.
Washington’s decision comes amid growing concerns over reports North Korea has deployed upwards of 10,000 troops to Russia to be sent into combat against Ukraine.
US Principal Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer said Washington had been clear it would formulate a response to the Kremlin’s decision to deploy “a foreign country’s forces” in Russia.
“We’ve been clear to the Russians that we would respond,” he told reporters in Brazil without formally confirming reports in US media that Biden had approved the strikes.
Speaking at the G20 in Brazil, Biden urged fellow world leaders to support Ukraine’s “sovereignty”.
“The United States strongly supports Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Everyone around this table in my view should as well,” Biden said in his opening remarks to the meeting, which Russia’s foreign minister is attending.
Zelensky visits frontline
Russia, which has been making rapid gains in Donetsk over recent weeks, also said it had claimed another village in the eastern region where Ukrainian defensives have been buckling.
Ukraine’s regional governor meanwhile said three people had been killed and two were wounded in separate Russian attacks on Siversk and Kostyantynivka, two towns in the Donetsk region.
And President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had visited two key frontline cities — Pokrovsk and Kupiansk.
Pokrovsk is an important Ukrainian garrison city in the Donetsk region that Russian forces have been advancing towards, while Russian troops briefly entered Kupiansk last week and are just a few kilometres from the city’s outskirts.
“This is a tense area,” Zelensky said at Pokrovsk, thanking Ukrainian forces for ensuring that the wider Donbas territory was not “completely occupied by Russia”.
Ukraine had been urging Washington to give it permission for longer-range strikes inside Russian territory for months.
Expressing frustrations over the delay, a senior official in the Ukrainian presidency said the decision was “needed a year ago”.
A Ukrainian serviceman deployed in the Donetsk region who identified himself as Odin echoed that sentiment.
“Is it long overdue. How long can this go on? They can kill our children, mothers,” he told AFP near Pokrovsk.
Zelensky also lambasted Russia over its latest strike on Odesa, which killed at least 10 and wounded 47.
“These are not random strikes — they are demonstrative strikes. Russia is showing what it is really interested in: only war,” Zelensky said in a separate comment responding to the strike.
The attacks came as engineers were still repairing damaged facilities from a Russian missile and drone barrage a day earlier.
Prime Minister Denys Shmygal said around 220,000 consumers were without electricity in the Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Energy operator Ukrenergo said it had stepped up electricity imports from neighbouring European countries.
Local officials in Sumy on Monday raised the death toll from a hit on the northeastern city in Sunday’s attacks to 12 killed and 84 wounded.
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