PRESS RELEASE

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Karasin: U.S. Arms to Ukraine Will Lead to War, Not Peace

Dec. 27, 2017 (EIRNS)—Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Grigoriy Karasin has offered another negative Russian assessment of the Trump Administration’s decision to sell arms to the Kiev regime in Ukraine.

"We have been extremely disappointed by the news that the U.S. authorities had given one of its arms manufacturers a license for supplying Kiev with large-caliber sniper rifles. Washington ‘hawks’ are thus attempting, the way they see it, to raise ‘the price of the conflict in Donbass’ for Russia. This is a deficient and dangerous reasoning. It leads to war, not to peace,"

Karasin explained. TASS reports that Karasin was referring to the State Department approval of an export license for the sale of the sniper rifles, granted a few days before the transfer of Javelin antitank weapons was announced by the Trump Administration.

Karasin called on both the United States and Canada, which is also selling arms to the regime, to analyze the potential consequences of selling lethal weapons to Ukraine.

"Do Washington and Ottawa have the guarantee that their lethal weapons will not fall into the ‘wrong hands’? That they won’t be picked up by terrorists? Or, for example, that they won’t be sold by enterprising Ukrainian businessmen somewhere in the Middle East or in some other spot on the map that is ’sensitive’ to the United States itself, above all?"

Karasin noted. He stressed that the United States and Canada were opening a "Pandora’s box" and "in fact, getting involved in the internal Ukrainian conflict, fanning the flames and making it international."