MOSCOW, July 13. /TASS/. New Western weapons supplies to Ukraine will only make the situation worse, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned.
"As for possible changes on the battlefield, new weapons supplies won’t lead to anything but will only make the situation worse; it will get worse for Ukraine," the head of state told the Rossiya-24 TV channel.
According to Putin, new weapons supplies "will further escalate the conflict." "If someone is interested in that - and it seems that there are such 'interested' parties - then this is the best way to achieve this goal, that is, to keep escalating the conflict and send new weapons," the Russian leader stressed.
"As many as 311 tanks were destroyed from June 4 to yesterday night. I think that a significant number of them - at least one-third - are Western-made [equipment], including Leopards," the president noted.
According to him, Ukrainian troops are afraid of using Western tanks because those are a priority target for Russian forces. "I can say that Ukrainian service members often refuse even to get into these (Western - TASS) tanks because they are a priority target for our guys and they are the first to be wiped out on the battlefield," the head of state said. "They burn like all other tanks and even better than the Soviet-made ones, known as T-72s," Putin added.
The Russian Defense Ministry said earlier that the Ukrainian armed forces had been making unsuccessful attempts at a counteroffensive since June 4. Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev stated that Ukraine had lost 13,000 troops since the start of the counteroffensive. Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized that the Ukrainian military had failed to achieve any success in any area. On July 3, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said that Russian forces had wiped out 16 Leopard tanks, which make up almost 100% of such tanks provided to the Ukrainian armed forces by Poland and Portugal. On July 12, the Group of Seven (G7) adopted a declaration on long-term security guarantees for Ukraine on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Vilnius, saying that increasing weapons supplies to Ukraine was a priority.