Russia warns US of risks of World War III

Russia said the West was playing with fire by considering allowing Ukraine to strike deep into Russia with Western missiles and cautioned the United States yesterday that World War Three would not be confined to Europe.

Ukraine attacked Russia’s western Kursk region on Aug. 6 and has carved out a slice of territory in the biggest foreign attack on Russia since World War Two. President Vladimir Putin said there would be a worthy response from Russia to the attack

Sergei Lavrov, who has served as Putin’s foreign minister for more than 20 years, said that the West was seeking to escalate the Ukraine war and was “asking for trouble” by considering Ukrainian requests to loosen curbs on using foreign-supplied weapons.

Lavrov spoke just as Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said yesterday that the war with Russia would eventually end in dialogue, but that Kyiv had to be in a strong position and that he would present a plan to U.S. President Joe Biden and his two potential successors.

Zelenskiy said he hoped to go to the United States in September to attend the U.N. General Assembly in New York and that he was preparing to meet Biden.

His remarks indicated that he sees the main potential forum for talks as a follow-up international summit on peace, at which Ukraine has said it wants Russia to have representatives. nZelenskiy said earlier this month that the assault on Russia’s Kursk region showed that Kremlin threats of retaliation were a bluff. Since invading Ukraine in 2022, Putin has repeatedly warned of the risk of a much broader war involving the world’s biggest nuclear powers, though he has said Russia does not want a conflict with the U.S.-led NATO alliance.

“We are now confirming once again that playing with fire – and they are like small children playing with matches – is a very dangerous thing for grown-up uncles and aunts who are entrusted with nuclear weapons in one or another Western country,” Lavrov told reporters in Moscow.

“Americans unequivocally associate conversations about the Third World War as something that, God forbid, if it happens, will affect Europe exclusively,” Lavrov said. Lavrov added that Russia was “clarifying” its nuclear doctrine.

Russia’s 2020 nuclear doctrine sets out when its president would consider using a nuclear weapon: broadly as a response to an attack using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction or conventional weapons “when the very existence of the state is put under threat”.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday that the war with Russia would eventually end in dialogue, but that Kyiv had to be in a strong position and that he would present a plan to U.S. President Joe Biden and his two potential successors.

The Ukrainian leader, addressing a news conference, said Kyiv’s three-week-old incursion into Russia’s Kursk region was part of that plan, but that it also comprised other steps on the economic and diplomatic fronts.

“The main point of this plan is to force Russia to end the war. And I want that very much – (that it would be) fair for Ukraine,” he told reporters in Kyiv of the war launched by Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

He did not elaborate further on the next steps, but said he would also discuss the plan with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and probably also with Republican Donald Trump, the two nominees for the U.S. presidential election

The first summit to advance Kyiv’s vision of peace, held in Switzerland in June, pointedly excluded Russia, while attracting scores of delegations, but not from China, the world’s second largest economy, despite Kyiv’s push to win over the global south.

Zelenskiy has been adamant that Russia wants to dictate terms to Ukraine in any settlement of the war, something that Kyiv sees as unacceptable.