Kiev targeted civilians in the Dec. 30 attack on Belgorod in order to provoke a response from Moscow that would revive Western interest in Kiev, according to Scott Ritter in an interview with Sputnik.
First, Ritter argued: “The Ukrainians claim to fire against military targets, but the use of cluster munitions and the targets they hit … indicate that this was a clear-cut case of the indiscriminate use of military weapons against exclusively civilian targets—a war crime in the extreme.” Ritter argued that it was designed to be an ugly provocation so as to elicit an equally ugly counterattack. Kiev wanted “to generate some sort of reaction by the Russian government that would allow Ukraine to create the case or restate the case to their Western allies for the need for continued financial and military support.”
