The foreign minister for Latvia, a member of the military alliance NATO, explored on Tuesday the possibility of Ukraine striking military targets in Russia.
Edgars Rinkēvičs, Latvia's foreign affairs minister, told Bloomberg that Ukraine should be allowed to launch attacks on military sites inside Russia to fend off strikes on its critical infrastructure.
"We should allow Ukrainians to use weapons to target missile sites or airfields from where those operations are being launched," Rinkēvičs told the news outlet on November 29 on the sidelines of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Bucharest, Romania.
Allies "should not fear" escalation, Rinkēvičs added. The foreign minister was referring to the bombardment of Russian missile strikes on Ukraine's critical infrastructure in October and November that has caused power outages and blackouts across the country.
The mass strikes were launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin as part of "retaliatory measures" following the October 8 explosion on the Kerch Bridge to Crimea, Alexey Chepa, a member of the Russian State Duma, said.
Kyiv hasn't claimed responsibility for the strike on the bridge over the Kerch Strait, the only bridge connecting the annexed Crimean Peninsula with Russia. The explosion damaged a key supply route for Russia's forces amid the Kremlin's flagging war effort in Ukraine.
Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, said that, based on Kyiv's estimates, Russia has the missile potential for three or four more mass strikes on his country.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has warned that Ukraine should expect more large-scale attacks by Russia, which is currently engaged in a campaign for the city of Bakhmut reminiscent of the battlefields of World War I.
The United States has been supplying Ukraine with weapons to assist in the war, launched by Putin in late February, but has not sent weapons that would allow the country to launch attacks inside Russia. Many fear such a move could escalate the conflict.
Responding to Rinkēvičs' remarks, the Russian embassy in Riga said that the foreign minister's suggestions could provoke a large-scale war.
"Such steps are not called for by some frenzied military expert, but by no less than by the head of the diplomatic department of Latvia E. Rinkēvičs," the embassy said in a statement on its Telegram channel.
"What is this, if not incitement to unleash a large-scale war?!" the embassy's statement added.
It said that "the minister has once again confirmed the puppet nature of the Kyiv regime, which does not dare to take a single step without a signal from Western patrons.
"Needless to say, the professional duty of any employee of the diplomatic service, and especially such a high-ranking one, is not to fan the 'fire of war', but, on the contrary, to contribute to the search for peaceful solutions to conflict settlement," the statement added.
"It seems that the Latvian minister has his own, frankly speaking, very peculiar ideas about the essence and tasks of diplomacy in the modern world."
Newsweek has contacted Latvia's foreign ministry for comment.
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About the writer
Isabel van Brugen is a Newsweek Reporter based in Kuala Lumpur. Her focus is reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war. Isabel ... Read more
