(St. Petersburg) Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened on Wednesday to deliver weapons to third countries that could strike Western interests, if the West allows Ukraine to strike Russia with its long-range missiles.
These comments come as the West begins to authorize strikes on Russian territory, under certain conditions, with weapons supplied to Kyiv. Ukraine has been demanding this right for months.
“If someone considers it possible to supply such weapons in the combat zone to strike our territory […], why should we not have the right to supply our weapons of the same type to regions of the world where the sensitive installations of countries that act in this way against Russia? », Launched Mr. Putin during a long interview with press agencies, including AFP.
Many Western states are opposed to the use of their weapons on Russian territory, particularly long-range, high-precision missiles, fearing that this could push Moscow into escalation.
The Russian president also reaffirmed that Western military instructors “are already in Ukraine, and are suffering losses there” which they are keeping secret.
“They are present on the territory of Ukraine and, unfortunately for them, they are suffering losses. The United States and European states prefer to remain silent,” he said during this meeting organized on the sidelines of the Economic Forum in St. Petersburg (northwest Russia).
France recently announced that it was considering sending military instructors to Ukraine to accelerate the training of Ukrainian soldiers and the formation of a European coalition for this purpose.
Mr. Putin had already claimed last week that Western instructors were in Ukraine, “under the guise of mercenaries” fighting alongside Ukrainian forces.
Throughout the meeting, the Russian leader reiterated his arguments that Russia was willing to come to the negotiating table, and that the best way to stop the war was for the West to “stop delivering weapons » to Ukraine.
“Providing weapons to a conflict zone is always a bad thing. Especially when it is linked to the fact that suppliers not only supply weapons, but control them. This is a very serious and very dangerous measure,” he said.
He also refused to quantify the losses suffered by the Russian army in nearly two and a half years of conflict, simply stating that they were “much lower” than Ukrainian losses, with “a ratio of one to five. »
“If we talk about irreparable losses (of deaths), then the ratio is one to five” in comparison with the losses suffered on the Ukrainian side, he said.
He assured that the ratio between the losses of the two armies was comparable to the difference between the number of prisoners taken by each side. According to him, Russia currently holds 6,465 Ukrainian soldiers, compared to 1,348 Russian soldiers in Ukrainian hands.
Since the start of the assault on Ukraine in February 2022, many Western experts have spoken of several tens of thousands of Russian soldiers killed.
The BBC and the independent Russian media Mediazona, for their part, claim to have verified the deaths of at least 50,000 Russian soldiers.
During this first press conference with Western media since December, Vladimir Putin also assured that Russia was ready to collaborate in a French investigation into the death of AFP journalist Arman Soldin, killed on May 9, 2023 in Ukraine, probably by Russian fire.
“We are ready to organize this work, I don’t know how it can be done in practice if this person died in a combat zone, but we will do whatever depends on us,” he said.
The Kremlin had previously indicated that Russia could not investigate, arguing that the area where the journalist was killed was territory under Ukrainian control.
The national anti-terrorism prosecution in France has opened a preliminary investigation for war crimes in order to determine the circumstances of Arman Soldin’s death and the origin of the shooting.
Arman Soldin, who was AFP’s video coordinator in Ukraine, died at age 32 in a rocket attack in Chasiv Yar, Donbass, while covering the particularly bloody Battle of Bakhmut.
The city was conquered by Russia at the end of May 2023, after more than nine months of fighting. Russia is still on the offensive in this area, and is now at the gates of Chassiv Yar.