MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia said on Sunday that U.S. lawmakers’ approval of $60.84 billion more in support for Ukraine shows Washington is increasingly entering a hybrid war with Russia that would end in a humiliation on par with Vietnam or Afghanistan.
President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has triggered the worst crisis in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, according to Russian and US diplomats.
The U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday, with broad bipartisan support, passed a $95 billion legislative package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, despite sharp objections from some Republicans.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said it was clear the United States wants Ukraine to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” including with attacks on sovereign Russian territory and civilians.
“Washington’s ever-deepening immersion in hybrid warfare against Russia will turn into such a strong and humiliating fiasco for the United States as that of Vietnam and Afghanistan,” Zakharova said.
He said that ordinary Ukrainians were being “forcibly pushed into slaughter as ‘cannon fodder,'” but that the United States was now no longer betting on a Ukrainian victory against Russia.
Leaders of the West and Ukraine have described the war in Ukraine as an imperial-style land grab, which shows that post-Soviet Russia is one of the two biggest state threats to global stability, along with China.
Putin, however, presents the war as part of a much larger struggle with the United States, which he says ignored Moscow’s interests after the 1991 Soviet collapse and then plotted to divide Russia and seize its natural resources.