The President of Russia, Vladimir Putinhe said Thursday that his country will find “an antidote” against Patriot air defense systems which the United States will supply to Ukraine. “We will take it into account and find an antidote,” she said at a press conference in Moscow after taking part in a meeting of the State Council on youth policies.
According to Putin, the Patriots are ‘pretty old’ systems and don’t work ‘as well’ as the Russian S-300. “We’ll crunch them like nuts,” he said of US missiles. The State Department announced on Wednesday, coinciding with a visit to Washington by Volodimir Zelensky, that he would supply Kiev with Patriot systems to counter Moscow’s airstrikes.
For Putin, the new US shipments to Ukraine are “prolonging the conflict”. When asked about peace negotiations with Ukraine, Putin said that “all armed conflicts end in negotiations in one way or another” and that not even Moscow is giving up. “But the Ukrainian authorities have forbidden to start negotiations with Russia“, he indicated.
According to the spokesman of the Russian presidency, Dmitri Peskov, during Zelensky’s visit there were no “real calls for peace” nor “warnings” by the United States to the Ukrainian president against “the continuous bombing of residential buildings in populated areas of Donbass .”, a region in eastern Ukraine controlled in part by pro-Russian separatists and frequently targeted by Ukrainian forces.
