The “powerful momentum” generated at the Trump-Putin talks earlier this year has gone, the Russian foreign ministry said as it warned to consider the “consequences” of handing Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine “a thousand times”.
Moscow blamed what it claimed to have identified as European warmongers who want to keep the war going until the final Ukrainian is dead for the failure of peace talks, but still found time to apportion some blame to Washington too. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in remarks published by Moscow state media that “unfortunately, the powerful momentum from the Anchorage [summit] in favour of agreements has largely been undermined”.
He said those sabotaging the peace process were “supporters of ‘war till the last Ukrainian’, mostly among the Europeans”. On the attempted reproachment between Russia and the United States which has been ongoing since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office at the beginning of this year, Ryabkov said “cracks” in the edifice of cooperation had now “reached the foundations”.
“The Americans are to blame for this”, he claimed. Just days earlier, the Kremlin said Putin felt ready to meet with President Trump in Moscow, illustrating the speed of change of rhetoric coming out of Russia.
The remarks come as Moscow telegraphs its very evident distress at comments from the United States that it is minded to hand Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles, a potent cruise missile, to Ukraine via the intermediary of European NATO states. President Trump said yesterday he’s “sort of made a decision” on the matter. Last month, Vice President JD Vance said talks were underway on the issue.
The Tomahawk has a range over 1,000 miles — well enough to strike Moscow, and indeed all of Russia’s inhabited West — and can be nuclear-armed, although of course Ukraine has no disclosed nuclear arsenal. Nevertheless, its deep-strike capability and ability to defeat air defences at a cost of well-over a million dollars per shot makes it a potent weapon that threatens the airbases from which Moscow launches its strikes on Ukraine, and Russian centres of government.
The willingness of Ukraine to launch decapitation strikes at military leadership sites was demonstrated earlier in the war when it struck the headquarters of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea at Sevastopol, with two plunging missile attacks.
Telling the United States to not give such weapons to Ukraine, Russia warned of consequences. Ryabkov stated on Wednesday delivering the cruise missiles would present a “serious shift in the situation” and said the U.S. should “fully assess the consequences of such a step a thousand times.”
The official spokesman of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also made such remarks, stating Ukraine getting Tomahawks would “send the confrontation into a downward spiral”. Maria Zakharova said: “We are keeping the closest eye on the situation and call for extreme restraint regarding this highly sensitive issue, which can significantly complicate efforts to resolve the Ukraine conflict. We hope that Washington will hear our message”.
The dire warnings were mixed in with simultaneously dispatched messages dismissive of the potency of the Tomahawk, with a Russian lawmaker assuring that Russia would simply shoot them down.
The Guardian cites the comments of Andrei Kartapolov who said: “We know these missiles very well, how they fly, how to shoot them down, we worked on them in Syria, so there is nothing new. Only those who supply them and those who use them will have problems … We will find ways to hurt those who cause us trouble.”
The Tomahawk question is the latest in a years-long series of will-they-won’t-they debates around incremental advances in Western support for Ukraine. Some of the most discussed of these have been about donations of long-range missiles, main battle tanks, and Western fighter jets. While these conversations have tended to go long, the trend has generally been for Ukraine getting what it wants.
It also comes amid clear signals from the White House that President Trump is very dissatisfied with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last month, Trump said: “Ukraine would be able to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that”. In the same statement President Trump said of Russia that their failure to quickly win the Ukraine war in the first days of the conflict had revealed it as a “paper tiger”.
The comments triggered a diplomatic protest from Moscow.
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