Last week, senior aide to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, Mykhailo Podolyak, had told The Independent that they had privately discussed the upcoming invasion of Russia’s Kursk Region with their Western partners, “just not on the public level.” Yet none of those partners has admitted to foreknowledge, and Washington explicitly denied any such knowledge.
Yesterday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave an interview to Pavel Zarubin, explaining that, throughout the Ukraine conflict, the U.S. has denied knowledge and responsibility for every new Kiev adventure, only to later have the denial evolve into the U.S. blaming Ukraine, telling Kiev not to go forward and watching them do so, anyhow. He added: “Listen, this is childish babble. Everyone understands perfectly well that Zelenskyy would never have decided on this if the United States had not instructed him to do this.”
Zelenskyy, speaking to a gathering of his ambassadors yesterday, on his visit to Dnipro, urged that they “continue convincing our partners to support Ukraine—to the maximum” to make sure they are “in sync with us in their determination…. If our partners lifted all the current restrictions on the use of weapons on Russian territory, we would not need to physically enter particularly the Kursk region to protect our Ukrainian citizens in the border communities…. But for now, we cannot use all the weapons at our disposal and eliminate Russian terrorists where they are.”