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When waging a defensive war, Ukraine has every right to strike military targets on the territory of the aggressor country. After the transfer of weapons by partners, they legally become Ukrainian. There are no weighty arguments left to prevent Ukraine from striking the territory of the Russian Federation. This was stated on the air of the FREEDOM TV channel by the adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine Mykhailo Podolyak.
“There are no arguments. It’s just that part of the political elite continues to live in history under the name of “chessboard”. They play some kind of fictional global politics, fictional conspiracy theories, the concept of containment, confrontation, long-term confrontation. But all these concepts do not work. They are effective only when there are cold relations, that is, when politics is more or less built on certain rules, these rules are somewhat violated, but do not collapse completely. And there are periods when there is an active phase of a hot war, a big war, which will determine the subsequent rules. And, accordingly, there is no need to play any variable, conspiracy scenarios and so on. Here you have to act either-or. Either you win the war, or you lose it,” Podolyak said.
But all these concepts of containment continue to be used. In order to get rid of this, certain internal traditions must work, which must return people to reality, the speaker continued.
“There is a clear, understandable thing. There is a country that committed an act of aggression deliberately, starting a major war. The subsequent actions of this country are illegal and only aggravate the general crime. The Russian Federation must be punished for this in full,” Podolyak emphasized.
For this, he believes, the Russian Federation must first suffer a military defeat, and secondly, must already now lose the opportunity to work calmly in global markets.
“Also, Russia must already now lose the opportunity to use international institutions for its support, but it continues to use this. And it must then go through a number of mandatory legal procedures. “Everything else does not matter,” said the guest of the broadcast.
We need to stop inventing excuses to prevent international law from working. Because everything that Ukraine does not receive today is, in fact, the nullification of international law, Podolyak is sure.
“Today, all those who wrote these rules, many of them at least, do not allow Ukraine to protect international law itself, because the transfer of weapons and the use of any weapons, if we have partnership relations, gives us the right to act at our own discretion. Our partners transfer weapons to us, and when we start using them, legally these are our weapons, we can do whatever we want,” the speaker said.
International law, the rules of warfare, and the UN statutory documents clearly state that when waging a defensive war, a country has the legal right to strike at any depth on the territory of the enemy country, the adviser to the head of the OPU emphasized.
“Roughly speaking, it is a thousand kilometers, a hundred kilometers, and twenty kilometers – it does not matter. And ground operations are possible, and destruction by long-range missiles, everything is possible. Each enemy strike is an additional aggravation of the crimes that Russia has already committed. Ukraine, in striking at Russian territory, is acting absolutely legally and has every right to do so. I don’t even see a subject for discussion here,” the guest of the broadcast summed up.
Read also: Stoltenberg has commented for the first time on the Ukrainian operation in Kursk region
The issue of using Western weapons on Russian territory has again become very relevant against the backdrop of the Kursk operation of the Defense Forces. Ukraine’s partners recognize that it has the right and must defend itself. However, there is no official, documented permission for the free use of long-range Western weapons yet.
