“It's clear there were no military objectives. This was a deliberately provocative attack, and it was an attack that was designed to anger Russia by intent. You don't target women, children, you don't target a civilian, a village, unless your goal is to anger Russia and provoke Russia into perhaps overreacting. I think that's the objective,” Ritter told Sputnik after being asked to comment on Thursday’s incident in the village of Lyubechane, in Russia's Bryansk Region.
“It's the only thing that can explain it other than simply stating that the people involved are the criminal elements with zero redeeming qualities, purely animalistic. And I'm not going down that route. What I believe is that these people were selected to do a mission that was designed to provoke Russia into an overreaction that could then be used by the Zelensky government as justification for requesting even more military assistance,” Ritter stressed.
The observer warned that Moscow could react to the attack in a variety of ways, for example by lifting its self-proscribed restrictions on targeting decision-making centers in Kiev, or even Ukraine’s president.
“Zelensky would say ‘this war has expanded and I now need the West to step up and deliver more equipment, F-16 fighters,’ things of that nature, because right now Zelensky has hit a brick wall. He's not getting what he believes he needs to survive. And if he doesn't get this, he will be facing the inevitability of the strategic defeat of Ukraine. And so I think you're going to see more and more acts of desperation like this in an effort to push Russia into overreacting so that Zelensky could use a Russian overreaction as justification for demanding even more assistance from the West,” Ritter said.
Commenting on the incident earlier in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the “terrorist act” near the border was “committed by the neo-Nazis and their masters,” and predicted that the West would ignore the crime, just as it had done with others like it. The Russian leader emphasized that those responsible “would not succeed” in their violent and criminal behavior, and that Russia would ultimately “crush them.”
Bryansk's authorities said that along with the deadly attack on a vehicle in Lyubechane, a residential building in the nearby village of Sushany caught fire after being hit by a bomb dropped from a Ukrainian drone.
On Wednesday, Putin had instructed Russia’s Federal Security Service to step up its work along the Russian-Ukrainian border, citing the dangers to critical infrastructure posed by Western-backed radicals and extremists.