On Friday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared that any container suspected of transporting weapons would be considered “fair game,” and would be stopped. He also promised to block the supply of Soviet-era S-300 Air Defense Systems to Ukraine.
“Every container heading into Ukrainian territory that we think is smuggling armaments would be fair game,” Lavrov stated in an interview with Russia Today.
In response to Ukraine’s request for a replacement for its S-300 missile system, Slovakia has said that it is ready to transfer its S-300 weaponry “immediately.”
Jaroslav Nad, Slovakia’s defense minister, stated, “We are eager to do so rapidly when we have a good successor.”
Nad spoke at a joint news conference with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on March 17. The S-300 is Slovakia’s only strategic defense system, and handing it over to Ukraine would amount to a “security breach in the NATO alliance.”
In a statement, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that Moscow “would not allow” the deployment of the Soviet-era S-300 system to Ukraine, calling the move “illegal.”
As an example, he cited international conventions and user certificates that prevented the implementation of Soviet or Russian systems in other countries.
In a phone call with The Epoch Times, Mr. Tomasz Smura, director of the Research Office at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, a Warsaw-based foreign policy and security think tank, said contractual restrictions on the re-export of arms such as those Lavrov mentioned are widespread.
However, Smura deemed the Russian foreign minister’s effort to depict the delivery of the S-300 missile system as a violation of a weapons export agreement as “nonsense,” given that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a blatant violation of the law.
Lavrov’s statements, according to Smura, were a scare tactic meant to cause worry among neighboring countries interested in bolstering military aid. He said that Russia’s choice to place its nuclear weapons on high alert days after the start of hostilities was a similar move.
“Russia has endeavored to intimidate its neighbors regularly, whether through fast missile assaults or by daring to deploy nuclear weapons before a fight, but this is nothing new,” stated Smura.
He said that Russian losses in its military campaign in Ukraine are motivating Lavrov’s threats to strike military trucks and take other actions to restrict military supply.
The Ukrainian opposition is “staunch and well-coordinated,” according to British intelligence, and has caused Russian forces to stop on all fronts.
“Russian soldiers have made little progress recently, and they continue to incur significant losses,” the United Kingdom’s intelligence agency said on March 17.
According to the Ukrainian military, the soldiers around Kyiv and Mykolaiv are still on the job, trying to derail Russian plans to encircle both cities.
“The cities of Chernihiv, Kharkiv Sumy, and Mariupol remain ringed and vulnerable to intensive Russian bombardment,” British intelligence warned in a March 18 statement, reiterating that Russia’s efforts over the previous week had yielded “little progress.”
In another strike on Western Ukraine near the Polish border on Friday, Russian missiles hit an aviation maintenance facility near Ukraine’s Lviv airport in the early morning hours.
There has been minimal progress in the peace discussions between Russia and Ukraine thus far.