In this pool photograph distributed by Russia’s state agency Sputnik, Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with the country’s Labour and Social Protection Minister in Moscow on April 10, 2024.
Gavriil Grigorov | AFP | Getty Images
Russia said on Sunday that U.S. lawmakers’ approval of $60.84 billion more in support for Ukraine showed that Washington was wading deeper into a hybrid war with Russia that would end in a humiliation on a par with Vietnam or Afghanistan.
President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has triggered the worst crisis in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Russian and U.S. diplomats.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday with broad bipartisan support passed a $95 billion legislative package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, over bitter objections from some Republicans.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that it was clear that the United States wanted Ukraine “to fight to the last Ukrainian” including with attacks on Russian sovereign territory and civilians.
“Washington’s deeper and deeper immersion in the hybrid war against Russia will turn into such a loud and humiliating fiasco for United States as Vietnam and Afghanistan,” Zakharova said.
She said that ordinary Ukrainians were being “forcibly driven to slaughter as ‘cannon fodder'” but that the United States was now no longer betting on a Ukrainian victory against Russia.
The leaders of the West and Ukraine have cast the war in Ukraine as an imperial-style land-grab which shows that post-Soviet Russia is one of the top two biggest nation-state threats to global stability, alongside China.
Putin, though, presents the war as part of a much bigger struggle with the United States, which he says ignored Moscow’s interests after the 1991 Soviet collapse and then plotted to cleave Russia apart and grab its natural resources.