The Kremlin has announced it has “no alternative” but to continue waging war, as it pushed back on United States President Donald Trump’s sudden sea change towards Ukraine that saw him brand Russia a “paper tiger”.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov hit back at Trump’s claim that Ukraine could in effect win the war, declaring on Wednesday that Russia would be continuing its offensive on Ukraine “to ensure our interests and achieve the goals”.

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“We are doing this for both the present and the future of our country. For many generations to come. Therefore, we have no alternative,” he said in a radio interview with Russia’s RBC radio station.

Tuesday had seen Trump throw his weight behind Ukraine after a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, posting on social media that the country was “in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form”.

Signalling his rapprochement with Russia was over, the US president said: “Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years, a war that should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win”.

Russia’s war was making it look like a “paper tiger” with a failing economy, he said.

On Wednesday, Peskov pushed back against Trump’s “paper tiger” remark, insisting Russia was more of a “bear”. Though he conceded the economy, which is slowing after three years of rapid growth and with stubborn inflation, was facing some headwinds.

He said it was wrong to think that Ukraine could recapture land taken by Moscow’s army. “The idea that Ukraine can recapture something is, from our point of view, mistaken,” he said.

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The Kremlin spokesman also poured scorn on Trump’s attempted rapprochement, which saw him welcome Russian President Vladimir Putin to a summit in Alaska last month, saying it had yielded “close to zero” results.

In a separate development on Wednesday, Russia’s finance ministry proposed raising the rate of value-added tax from 20 to 22 percent to finance “defence and security”, as analysts predicted the country’s rate of economic growth would plummet to around 1 percent, from 4.3 percent last year.

Europe on high alert

After the Alaska summit and meetings with Zelenskyy and prominent European leaders at the White House, Trump announced he was arranging for direct talks between leaders.

But Putin has not shown any interest in meeting with Zelenskyy, and Moscow has only intensified its bombardment of Ukraine, often targeting civilians in residential areas while committing a series of provocative violations of Eastern European airspace.

Last week, Estonia said three Russian fighter jets violated its airspace, not long after 20 Russian drones entered Poland’s airspace, raising fears among Europe’s NATO countries of a spillover from the Ukraine war.

On Tuesday, NATO had warned Russia about its actions, reminding the country of its “ironclad” adherence to Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty, which “commits all member states to mutual defence in the event of an attack on any one of them”.

On Wednesday, Spain’s Defence Ministry said a military jet with Defence Minister Margarita Robles on board suffered a GPS “disturbance” that morning while flying near Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave on its way to Lithuania.

No further details were reported.

The incident follows a similar case at the end of last month, which saw the GPS system of a plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen jammed while en route to Bulgaria.

A European Union spokesperson said at the time that Bulgarian authorities suspected the incident was due to interference by Russia.

Ukraine targets oil and gas infrastructure

On Wednesday, Ukraine carried out an overnight drone strike on the Gazprom Neftekhim Salavat petrochemical plant in central Russia’s Bashkortostan region, according to the regional governor.

The strike, which sparked a fire, was the second such attack on a major industrial facility in the Russian region in a week. Last week, Ukraine attacked the same complex, controlled by energy giant Gazprom.

Kyiv has intensified drone attacks on Russia’s vast oil and gas infrastructure in the past weeks, targeting refineries and export-bound pipelines, as peace talks with Moscow falter.

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A Ukrainian drone attack in the southern Russian city of Novorossiisk killed two people, according to Veniamin Kondratyevm, the regional governor of Krasnodarskiy Krai.