MOSCOW - Russia has said that US lawmakers’ approval of US$60.84 billion (S$82.8 billion) more in support for Ukraine showed that Washington was wading deeper into a hybrid war with Russia that would end in a humiliation on a par with Vietnam or Afghanistan.

President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has triggered the worst crisis in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, according to Russian and US diplomats.

The US House of Representatives on April 20 with broad bipartisan support passed a US$95 billion legislative package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, over bitter objections from some Republicans.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on April 21 that it was clear that the US wanted Ukraine “to fight to the last Ukrainian” including with attacks on Russian sovereign territory and civilians.

“Washington’s deeper and deeper immersion in the hybrid war against Russia will turn into such a loud and humiliating fiasco for United States as Vietnam and Afghanistan,” Ms Zakharova said.

She said that ordinary Ukrainians were being “forcibly driven to slaughter as ‘cannon fodder’” but that the US was now no longer betting on a Ukrainian victory against Russia.

The leaders of the West and Ukraine have cast the war in Ukraine as an imperial-style land-grab which shows that post-Soviet Russia is one of the top two biggest nation-state threats to global stability, alongside China.

Mr Putin, though, presents the war as part of a much bigger struggle with the US, which he says ignored Moscow’s interests after the 1991 Soviet collapse and then plotted to cleave Russia apart and grab its natural resources.

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s Defence Ministry said on April 21 it will discuss with the US how to use the funding for the island.

Underscoring the pressure Taiwan faces from China, the ministry said on April 21 morning that over the previous 24 hours, 14 Chinese military aircraft had crossed the sensitive median line of the Taiwan Strait.

The median line once served as an unofficial border between the two sides, over which neither side’s military crossed, but China’s air force now regularly sends aircraft over it. China says it does not recognise the line’s existence.

Democratically governed Taiwan has faced increased military pressure from China, which views the island as its own territory to be reunified, by force if necessary. Taiwan’s government rejects those claims. REUTERS