Britain 'blinked first' after Putin's threat over 'unstoppable' Oreshnik missiles, says Kremlin
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The Kremlin says Britain is intimidated by Vladimir Putin’s threat to deploy his new Oreshnik hypersonic missile. Moscow’s ambassador to the UK, Andrey Kelin, was apparently alluding to Ukraine not using British Storm Shadow missiles against Russian territory for almost one month. After finally giving permission to Volodymyr Zelensky to deploy Storm Shadow to hit Putin’s land, they were deployed on November 20, but not since, although US supplied missiles have been used against Russian territory.
The following day Russia hit Ukrainian city Dnipro with its fearsome medium range ballistic Oreshnik missile in response to use of UK and US missiles against his territory in what was widely seen as a revenge attack. This was accompanied by a barrage of threats from Putin to re-use it with doomsday consequences unless the West stopped allowing Ukraine to hit Russian territory with NATO missiles.
This forced London to take a more cautious approach regarding strikes with long-range weapons deep inside Russia, alleged Kelin in an interview with state-run Rossiya-24 propaganda channel. “Not that they [the British government] were scared, but overall they realised that a completely new factor had appeared on the scene - that's the first thing,” said the ambassador.
“The second is that we retaliated for the use of Storm Shadow [long-range missiles] deep inside Russian territory. That's obvious as well. There is a sense that they are being a little more cautious, a little more balanced in their approach to this issue. And, in fact, they are now closely following what is happening.”.
