Russia warns West ‘playing with fire’ over F-16 jets for Ukraine

Moscow: Russia’s top diplomat warned Sunday that Western nations were ‘playing with fire’ by agreeing to provide Ukraine with US-made F-16 fighter jets, calling it ‘an unacceptable escalation’ of the conflict.

‘It’s playing with fire, without a doubt,’ Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in an excerpt from a Russian TV interview posted on social media, denouncing an attempt to ‘weaken Russia’ by ‘Washington, London and their satellites in the EU’.