US media have reported about flaring tensions between Washington and Kiev “as to the appropriate response to Russia’s actions” related to Moscow’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine.
Politico cited an unnamed source as saying US officials “were angered when the Ukrainians detonated a car bomb in Moscow in August” that killed the daughter of prominent Russian political philosopher Alexander Dugin.
The source said that “the public release of information about that plot in recent days was meant, in part, as a warning to Ukraine not to repeat a similarly provocative move.”
The claims come as an unnamed former White House official was quoted by the Washington Post (WaPo)as saying that US President Joe Biden earlier told Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky “privately” that “it would be hard for him to keep asking Congress for money if Zelensky appeared ungrateful and kept saying it was not enough.”
The WaPo reported in this context that shortly after Russia launched its special operation demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine on February 24, the Ukrainian president “called repeatedly and publicly on the United States and other Western countries to do more — to send additional weapons and impose harsher sanctions on Russia — even as Biden and Congress were already sending unprecedented amounts of aid and advanced weapons” to Kiev.
This comes after the Pentagon announced last week a new military aid package to Ukraine, including four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), howitzers, artillery and mortar rounds, and small arms ammunition worth a total of $625 million. This brings the total US military assistance for Ukraine to more than $17.5 billion since the beginning of the Russian special military operation.
Moscow Raps West Over Arms Supplies to Kiev
Moscow has repeatedly slammed the West for its weapon supplies to Kiev, with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warning that "any weapon, [and] any arms shipment on the Ukrainian territory" would be considered “a legitimate target” by the Russian military.
For her part, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has recently stressed that “Washington has once again demonstrated how much it has lost touch with reality, having actually become a party” to the Ukraine conflict. According to her, “further evidence of this is the US Congress recently agreeing on the allocation of a new assistance package to the Kiev regime worth almost $12 billion.”
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, for his part, underlined that the Ukraine conflict had become another pretext for the US and its allies to unleash an economic and information war against Moscow in order to deplete it strategically. “Ukraine has been picked [by the West] as an instrument of a hybrid war against Russia,” Shoigu added.
Russian President Vladimir Putin highlighted in his address to the nation in late September that the West’s current goal is “to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy” Russia. Putin referred to “some irresponsible politicians in the West,“ who “talk about plans to organize the supply of long-range offensive weapons to Ukraine, systems that are capable of launching strikes against Crimea and other regions of Russia.” The Russian Foreign Ministry warned that the West’s supplies of such weaponry to Kiev would become “red lines” for Moscow, which the ministry said had enough instruments to retaliate.
Darya Dugina's Assassination
In a separate development last week, the New York Times reported that US intelligence services believe that the Ukrainian government authorized the car bomb assassination of Russian journalist Darya Dugina in August.
An assessment pointing toward Ukrainian responsibility for the attack was previously circulated within the US government, the report said, citing unnamed officials with knowledge of the situation. The United States has been frustrated by a perceived lack of transparency by Ukraine about its covert plans, particularly those set to take place on Russian soil, according to the report.
Dugina, daughter of prominent political philosopher Alexander Dugin, was killed on August 20 in a car bomb attack after leaving an event where her father was also present. Some US officials reportedly suspected that Alexander Dugin was the intended target of the assassination.
Ukrainian citizen Natalia Vovk was accused as a suspect in the attack by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), who claimed she entered Russia using a fake passport and then left the country through Estonia after carrying out the assassination.