MOSCOW (Reuters) – The United States should take into account Moscow’s warnings on risks of further escalation around the conflict in Ukraine, Russia’s state-run news agency RIA Novosti cited Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying on Friday.
Commenting on the possibility of a meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, he said there will not be any meeting as the sides have “nothing to talk about”.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said separately that giving carte blanche for Kyiv to carry out long-range strikes deep inside Russia would change the nature of the conflict in Ukraine.
“We would like to remind the hawks on both sides of the Atlantic… They are playing with fire and have lost all sense of reality,” she told a briefing.
“The scale of conflict which started because of the West risks becoming completely different, which could bring dangerous consequences for the whole world.”
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle and Hugh Lawson)