Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday said he hoped Ukraine’s allies took “seriously” Moscow’s recent use of a hypersonic missile in the conflict there, and warned that Russia was ready to use “any means” to defend itself.
The United States and its allies “must understand that we would be ready to use any means not to allow them to succeed in what they call strategic defeat of Russia,” Lavrov said in an interview with US media personality Tucker Carlson.
Two weeks ago, Russia fired its new Oreshnik hypersonic missile on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro in an escalation of the almost three-year war.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has since threatened to use the weapon on Kyiv in response to Ukraine’s strikes on Russia’s territory, which took place after the United States authorized the use of its ATACMS weapon system in such attacks.
“We are sending signals and we hope that the last one, a couple of weeks ago, the signal with the new weapons system called Oreshnik… was taken seriously,” Lavrov said.
While he insisted that Russia does not want to escalate the situation and wants to “avoid any misunderstanding” with Washington and its partners, Lavrov warned that “we will send additional messages if they don’t draw necessary conclusions.”
Putin said the Oreshnik missile flies at 10 times the speed of sound and cannot be intercepted by air defenses.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the strike “the latest bout of Russian madness” and appealed for updated air-defense systems to meet the new threat.
