«Obviously, Washington is deliberately trying to inflict strategic defeat on us,» Russian ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov told Newsweek.
The reports appeared Tuesday in a number of U.S. and U.K. outlets, citing unnamed U.S. officials who said that the White House could announce the move as early as Wednesday.
Russian ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov saw the move as part of a longstanding pattern that has emerged since the beginning of the war exactly 11 months ago.
The senior Russian diplomat, who just hours earlier met with new U.S. ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy in Washington, D.C., ahead of her departure to Moscow, argued that the latest delivery would mark yet another escalation in U.S. support for its Ukrainian partner.
«An analysis of the entire sequence of Washington’s actions shows that the Americans are constantly raising the «bar» of military assistance to their puppet government,» Antonov said. «This is especially clear when the Russian armed forces gain new victories and confidently liberate the territory of Russia from the Nazi threat.»
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, and his top officials have consistently rejected any association with Nazism or that Kyiv’s aspirations to join the U.S.-led NATO military alliance posed any threat to Russia. Moscow, however, has portrayed the conflict as one of both ideology and national security as NATO expanded its military presence in the former Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and began aiding Ukraine militarily after unrest first emerged in 2014 with a pro-West uprising in Kyiv.
Antonov asserted that Russia would eliminate all of the Western bloc’s weapons in Ukraine, to include the state-of-the-art U.S. tank.
«If a decision to transfer to Kiev M1 Abrams is made,» the Russian envoy said, «American tanks without any doubt will be destroyed as all other samples of NATO military equipment.»
Zelensky did not immediately react to the news, which happened to emerge early morning on his birthday local time, and his officials have yet to weigh in either.
