MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin said on Sunday that Russia was deeply concerned about the possibility of the United States supplying Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, warning that the war had reached a dramatic moment with escalation on all sides.
US President Donald Trump said on Monday that before agreeing to provide Tomahawks, he would like to know what Ukraine plans to do with them because he did not want to escalate the war between Russia and Ukraine. However, he said he had “kind of made up his mind” about it.
The Tomahawk missiles have a range of 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles), meaning Ukraine could use them for long-range attacks deep inside Russia, including Moscow. Some retired Tomahawk variants may carry a nuclear warhead, according to the US Congressional Research Service.
“The Tomahawks issue is extremely worrying,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Russian state television journalist Pavel Zarubin in remarks published Sunday. “Now is really a very dramatic time in terms of the fact that tensions are rising everywhere.”
The war in Ukraine, the deadliest in Europe since World War II, has sparked the biggest confrontation between Russia and the West since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and Russian officials say they are now in a “hot” conflict with the West.
Peskov said that if Tomahawks were launched against Russia, Moscow would have to take into account that some versions of the missile can carry nuclear warheads.
“Imagine: a long-range missile is launched and it is flying and we know it could be nuclear. What should the Russian Federation think? How should Russia react? Military experts abroad should understand this,” Peskov said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this month that it was impossible to use Tomahawks without the direct participation of US military personnel and that any supply of such missiles to Ukraine would trigger a “qualitatively new stage of escalation.”
The Financial Times reported on Sunday that the United States has been helping Ukraine organize long-range attacks on Russian energy facilities for months. The Financial Times said U.S. intelligence helps kyiv shape route planning, altitude, timing and mission decisions, allowing Ukraine’s long-range unidirectional attack drones to evade Russian air defenses.
Putin describes the war as a watershed moment in Moscow’s relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 by expanding NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine and Georgia.
Ukraine and its allies have portrayed it as an imperial-style land grab and have repeatedly vowed to defeat Russian forces.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Helen Popper)