MOSCOW—Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday that Russian forces would respond to the delivery of longer-range Western weapons to Kyiv by trying to push Ukrainian forces further away from its borders to create a safe buffer zone.
Lavrov told state TV that everybody wanted the conflict in Ukraine—which Moscow calls a “special military operation”—to end, but that the West’s support for Kyiv was playing an important role in how Russia approached the campaign.
“We see how the whole of NATO is waging war against us,” Lavrov said.
“We’re now seeking to push back Ukrainian army artillery to a distance that will not pose a threat to our territories,” he added. “The greater the range of the weapons supplied to the Kyiv regime, the more we will have to push them back from territories which are part of our country.”…