Deborah Bronner, the British ambassador in Moscow, was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry on Thursday regarding the drone attack carried out in the Sevastopol Bay over the weekend. The Russians have also accused Britain of laziness in the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.
Russian foreign affairs spokeswoman Marija Zakharova promised on Wednesday that Moscow would present evidence to the British ambassador that Britain was involved in the October 29 attack on the Russian Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol and sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
The ambassador spent more than half an hour in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when he left, he did not want to answer the journalists waiting for him in front of the building.
According to a statement issued by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the afternoon, the ministry strongly protested to the ambassador that British military specialists are involved in the training and equipping of Ukrainian special operations forces, among other things, for maritime sabotage operations.
According to Moscow, such a confrontational British action threatens to escalate the situation and may have unpredictable and dangerous consequences.
According to the position of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, if the "aggressive actions", which involve the risk of drifting into direct conflict, continue, the responsibility for the harmful consequences and the growing tension between the two countries will clearly fall on the British side.
The Russian accusations are clear
According to Russian foreign affairs information, earlier in the Black Sea, units of the Ukrainian Navy carried out dives with the assistance of British specialists and, among other things, practiced object detonation.
In August-September of this year, about 15 British military trainers trained Ukrainian soldiers in the handling of underwater drones designed to attack ships on the Pervomaisky island in the Dnieper estuary, three kilometers south of Oksakhiv.
In the same period, the crews of mine-sweeping ships intended for Ukraine also received British training, and, according to the Russian side, the British Air Force handed over flying drones to the Ukrainian army.
One cannot ignore the text in which British Prime Minister Liz Truss immediately reports to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that it is "done" a minute after the gas pipelines were blown up.
- declared Nikolai Patrusev, the secretary of the Security Council, during his meeting with his colleagues from the CIS in Moscow on Thursday. Patrusev emphasized that the main beneficiary of the attack on the pipelines was the United States. And according to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the British Navy was also involved in its planning and implementation.
IT entrepreneur and hacker Kim Dotcom claimed on Twitter that Truss sent Blinken a text saying "It's done" a minute after the Nord Stream explosion. According to Dotcom, this is how the Russians found out that Britain blew up the pipelines. According to the version of the story picked up by some of the press, the message was not sent by Truss from the phone that was hacked according to press reports.
Kim Dotcom (Kim Schmitz), a German-Finnish entrepreneur, the founder of Megaupload and the Mega file sharing service, currently lives in New Zealand. The American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) accuses him of extortion, money laundering and fraud. The United States initiated his extradition to New Zealand, which Dotcom challenged in court, MTI informed.
MTI
Featured image: The British Embassy building in Moscow. Photo: Oleg Nikishin/Epsilon/Getty Images
