Moscow: US using ‘non-existent Russian threat’ to boost military

Top Russian officials are accusing the United States of using a “non-existent” threat to justify a new arms race between Washington and Moscow.

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in a speech at an annual security conference on Wednesday accused the U.S. of using “the non-existent Russian threat to methodically boost their military potential,” The Associated Press reports.

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“The danger of provocations and military incidents has significantly increased,” Shoigu said, before calling the U.S.’s missile defense program a “major destabilizing factor inciting an arms race.”

The AP reported that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service chief, Sergei Naryshkin, accused the U.S. and British governments of staging the assassination attempt of Sergei Skripal, an ex-Russian spy living in Britain who was found poisoned along with his daughter.

“Washington has become fixated on fighting the non-existent Russian threat, and that fight has reached such a scale and acquired such absurd traits that we can talk about the return of the gloomy times of the Cold War,” he added.

Skripal’s death was a “grotesque provocation rudely staged by the British and U.S. intelligence agencies,” Naryshkin added, according to the news service.

The two countries traded diplomatic expulsions last week, with Washington and Moscow expelling dozens of diplomats.

Russia’s response “marks a further deterioration in the United States-Russia relationship,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement at the time.

“Russia’s response was not unanticipated, and the United States will deal with it,” she added.

–This report was updated at 11:06 a.m.