Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a flower-laying ceremony at the Russian Civil War memorial on Unity Day, in Sevastopol, Crimea
EKO HOT BLOG reports that during a visit to Seoul, South Korea, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin inadvertently referred to Russia as the Soviet Union.
During a news briefing, Austin was responding to a question on how the United States planned to respond to possible Russian aggression along the Ukraine border, adding that any response would be determined in collaboration with the international community.
“Whatever we do will be done as a part of an international community. The best case though is that we won’t see an incursion by the Soviet Union into the Ukraine,” Lloyd said, referring to Russia but accidentally calling it the “Soviet Union,” Reuters reported.
The Soviet Union, which was founded in the 1920s, disintegrated in the early 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Ukraine, which claims Russia has moved around 90,000 troops near its border, was formerly a Soviet country but is now forging aspirations to join the European Union and NATO, according to Reuters.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that he had spoken with practically all of NATO’s 29 members, and that they had expressed support for preventing Russian aggression.
Russian officials ordered U.S. Embassy personnel who had been in Moscow for three years or more to leave the country on Wednesday, amid rising tensions between the two countries, likely in response to Washington’s decision to send 50 Russian diplomats home in June, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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