Dmitry Rogozin, former head of the Roscosmos Russian space agency and now a Senator in Russia’s Federation Council, charged in a posting on his Telegram channel, that the U.S. is behind the attack on the Armavir early warning radar station. Rogozin suggested that it was extremely unlikely that the strike, which Ukrainian media reported involved several drones, was carried out at Kiev’s sole initiative and without U.S. involvement.
“Since the U.S.S.R. acquired means of delivering nuclear weapons, the United States of America has never given up attempts to achieve superiority over us in the military-strategic sphere,” he said, according to a machine translation of his remarks. “NEVER. And if previously such attempts lay in the sphere of military-technical developments and concepts (for example, the ‘Strategic Defense Initiative’ of the 1980s, which envisaged the deployment in space of a group of military lasers to intercept Soviet ICBMs, or ‘Strategic Missile Defense’ of the 2000s and to the present day, which was accompanied by the U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty and the deployment of U.S. and NATO missile defense radars and missile bases directly near our western and eastern borders), now Washington has come out the mastermind of the crime, having hired an irresponsible bandit [Zelenskyy] trying to damage the facility of our Missile Attack Warning System (MAWS), a key element of the Combat Command System for Strategic Nuclear Forces.”
Rogozin discounted the possibility that the strike was carried out on Kyiv’s initiative. “However, taking into account Washington’s deep involvement in this armed conflict and American total control over Kyiv’s military planning, the story that the United States does not know about Ukrainian plans to strike Russia’s missile defense system can be discarded. Washington will have to answer fully for the past and future crimes of the distraught Ukrainian leadership.”
