Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday it was now absolutely clear that the United States was Russia’s adversary and that US President Donald Trump’s recent steps on Ukraine amounted to an act of war against Russia.
Trump said during the US election campaign that he would swiftly end the Ukraine war which his administration has cast as a "proxy war" between Washington and Moscow, though he has recently expressed frustration about President Vladimir Putin.
Trump, who has described Russia as a "paper tiger", said on Wednesday he had cancelled a planned summit with Putin, and the US Treasury slapped sanctions on two of Russia’s biggest oil companies.
"The United States is our adversary, and their talkative 'peacemaker' has now fully embarked on the warpath with Russia," Medvedev, who serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, wrote on social media, referring to Trump.
"The decisions taken are an act of war against Russia. And now Trump has fully aligned himself with loony Europe."
Putin, paramount leader since the last day of 1999, remains the final voice on Russian policy though Medvedev, an arch-hawk who has repeatedly goaded Trump on social media, gives a sense of hardline thinking within the elite.
Trump in August said that he had ordered two US nuclear submarines to move closer to Russia in response to what he called "highly provocative" comments from Medvedev about the risk of war.
Medvedev said that the move of the "Trumpian pendulum" simply meant that Russia could now hammer Ukraine with a wide variety of weapons "without regard to unnecessary negotiations."
Putin, who ordered Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022 after eight years of fighting in the country’s east between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces, has repeatedly said he is ready to talk about peace.
European leaders and Ukraine say they do not think Putin wants peace and have cautioned that Russia might one day attack a NATO member, a claim the Kremlin has repeatedly dismissed as nonsense.
Russia’s foreign ministry said that Moscow’s aims in Ukraine remained unchanged from 2022: that Ukraine should be neutral, non-aligned, demilitarised and ensure the rights of Russian speakers and Orthodox believers.
"We need a configuration of negotiated solutions that will eliminate the root causes of the conflict and ensure reliable peace in the context of building a Eurasian and broader global system of indivisible security," spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
She cast US sanctions as extremely counterproductive and warned that if the Trump administration followed the example of previous US administrations then it would fail.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)