In her regular press conference, yesterday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that “Any attempts to assault the peninsula [of Crimea] will be met with an immediate and harsh response as before.” Commenting on a recent statement by Oleksii Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, who threatened to “smoke Russians out of Crimea” with weapons, Zakharova stated:
“I would like to remind all Kiev extremists that the Crimea chapter was closed when its residents made their choice back in 2014, knowing what awaited them, that they would be ‘smoked out’ as Danilov put it, in different ways over all these years, economically, socially, in the humanitarian sense, based precisely on this nationalistic logic.”
