Russia says deeper US hybrid war using Ukraine will end in Vietnam-style humiliation

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia said on Sunday that U.S. lawmakers’ approval of an additional $60.84 billion in support for Ukraine showed that Washington was deepening a hybrid war with Russia that would end in a humiliation equivalent to that of Vietnam or Afghanistan.

President Vladimir PutinThe full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has triggered the worst crisis in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, according to Russian and American diplomats.

The US House of Representatives on Saturday approved, with broad bipartisan support, a $95 billion legislative package that provides security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, despite stiff objections from some Republicans.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said it was clear the United States wanted Ukraine to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” including with attacks on Russian sovereign territory and civilians.

“Washington’s ever deeper immersion in hybrid warfare against Russia will turn into a fiasco as loud and humiliating for the United States as Vietnam and Afghanistan,” Zakharova said.

She said that ordinary Ukrainians were being “forcibly led into massacre like ‘cannon fodder'” but that the United States was no longer betting on a Ukrainian victory against Russia.

Western and Ukrainian leaders have framed the war in Ukraine as an imperial-style land grab, which shows that post-Soviet Russia is one of the two biggest nation-state threats to global stability, alongside China.

Putin, however, presents the war as part of a much larger struggle with the United States, which he says ignored Moscow’s interests after the 1991 Soviet collapse and then plotted to divide Russia and appropriate its natural resources. .

(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge)