MOSCOW, June 30. /TASS/. The faked incident in Kremenchug was conceived by Kiev on the eve of international events to make the West provide more weapons, Russia’s OCSE envoy Alexander Lukashevich said on Thursday.
"It was a faked incident, which, of course, was staged on the eve of international events with the aim of persuading the West to provide a common response and, what is more important, more weapons," Lukashevich told the Rossiya-24 round-the-clock television news channel an interview.
He stressed that Russian diplomats had confirmed the rumored Kremenchug incident was a fake on the basis of accurate data provided by the Russian Defense Ministry.
"Also, this is well seen in the video posted by one notorious gentleman [an adviser to the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Anton] Gerashchenko, showing shelves with glass bottles - all of them intact," Lukashevich said.
"It is very difficult to argue with the hard facts, especially those recorded by our Defense Ministry from different angles. We made it clear that we hit only those targets which pose a threat to our soldiers who are carrying out the special military operation, and facilities that pose a threat to the civilian population. Of course, no one attacks civilian infrastructure," Lukashevich stressed.
On Tuesday, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said that Russia’s Aerospace Forces had attacked hangars in Kremenchug housing weapons supplied from the US and the EU. The strike destroyed Western-made weapons and ammunition, intended to be sent to the Ukrainian forces in Donbass. Konashenkov added that the explosion of stored ammunition caused a fire in a non-functioning shopping center located next to the industrial plant.