British politicians are now legitimate military targets for Russia, according to its former president.
“The U.K. acts as Ukraine’s ally providing it with military aid in the form of equipment and specialists, i.e., de facto is leading an undeclared war against Russia,” former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a senior member of the Kremlin Security Council, said. “That being the case, any of its public officials (either military, or civil, who facilitate the war) can be considered as a legitimate military target.“
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Medvedev, who was the president of Russia between 2008 and 2012 and was the prime minister of Russia between 2012 and 2020, has continued to make heated comments about the war and the West on social media, including calling for the assassination of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
These comments came in response to remarks by a top British official.
Speaking in Estonia on Tuesday, U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly affirmed his belief that Ukraine “has a right” to hit targets beyond its borders as a part of its self-defense against Russian aggression.
“It's important to remember that Ukraine does have the legitimate right to defend itself,” Cleverly said. “It has a legitimate right to do so within its own borders, of course, but it does also have the right to project force beyond its borders to undermine Russia's ability to project force into Ukraine itself.”
Cleverly's comments demonstrated a divergence between the United Kingdom's and the United States's stances on the war. U.S. officials have maintained that they do not want their weapons used to strike targets within Russia's borders to avoid a possible escalation of the war.
The Biden administration has “been clear, privately and publicly, with the Ukrainians that we don't support attacks on Russian soil,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said. "We are going to continue to give them what they need to defend themselves and defend their territory, Ukrainian soil, but we don't support attacks on, in Russia. What we have said is we don't want to encourage or enable attacks inside Russia because we don't want to see the war escalate beyond the violence [that] has already visited upon the Ukrainian people."
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On Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Defense accused Ukraine of launching eight drones toward Moscow, damaging two buildings.
"Kyiv chose the path of intimidation of Russian citizens and attacks on residential buildings," Russian President Vladimir Putin said in response to the attack, which Ukrainian officials denied responsibility for. "We are concerned about attempts to evoke a response from Russia. It seems that is what they [Ukraine wants] ... Kyiv provokes us to mirror actions. We will see what to do about this."