STRELNA, September 12. /TASS/. Permission to hit Russian territory would increase the West's involvement in the conflict in Ukraine and entail a reaction from Moscow, Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with the daily Izvestia.

"There is no need to exaggerate. But, naturally, this raises significantly the degree of the collective West’s involvement in this war around Ukraine. Of course, this will entail a corresponding reaction from Russia," Peskov warned, commenting on the speculations that the West might make a positive decision on the issue of letting the Ukrainian military use its weapons for strikes deep into Russia.

He emphasized that "this is an attempt to continue the war to the last Ukrainian."

On Wednesday, the ABC television network quoted a Ukrainian presidential adviser as saying that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky at a meeting in Kiev made no decisions regarding the use of US weapons for strikes deep inside Russia. He said that during the lengthy meeting, Zelensky presented to Blinken a detailed plan for how Kiev could use Western weapons to attack Russian territory and provided a list of possible targets. However, the Ukrainian official added that no decisions had been made on this score.

Earlier, Blinken told a joint news conference in Kiev with British and Ukrainian foreign ministers, David Lammy and Andrey Sibiga, that the United States bore in mind the factor of a possible escalation of the situation in Ukraine due to discussions with the Kiev authorities on strikes with Western weapons deep into Russian territory.