MOSCOW, November 28. /TASS/. Chairman of the foreign policy committee in the upper house of the Russian parliament, Konstantin Kosachev, has warmed Ukraine against a missile-firing exercise in the Russia airspace.
"If the situation escalates to the point where a military response is necessary, this will surely be the most frightening and undesirable scenario of events, which all of us should prevent at all costs," Kosachev said at an international conference titled ‘The Crisis of the World Order: Responses of the World Community’ timed for the Primakov Readings forum.
"I’d place an accent on the phrase ‘all of us’ because that’s not exclusively Russia’s problem," he said.
Kosachev pointed to the absence of any public comments on the part of Ukraine’s Western partners, none of which had made an effort to interdict the Kiev government from making the step.
"Under the current version of events, the desire to support the ‘right guys’ brings about nothing but an escalation of the conflict," he said.
"Eight years ago, the leader of another country who was in conflict with Russia — I mean Georgia — tried to test the endurance of our Armed Forces," Kosachov recalled. "We know perfectly well what it ended in. I hope the Ukrainian government remembers this well enough, too."
The Russian Federal Service for Civil Aviation (Rosaviatsiya) said earlier that Ukraine had taken a unilateral decision of a missile-firing exercise in Russia’s sovereign airspace in the Simferopol flight zone in violation of all the international agreements.
On November 24, the Ukrainian government issued a notification on activating dangerous flights zones in the airspace in connection with the firing exercise scheduled for December 1 and December 2, 2016.
Rosaviatsiya said along with it that the airspace over Crimea would not be closed. It expressed the confidence the illegal decisions would be revoked.