Russia says navy carried out live fire exercise in Black Sea

MOSCOW — Russia's navy carried out a live fire exercise in the Black Sea, Moscow's defense ministry said on Friday, days after the Kremlin declared it would consider ships traveling to Ukraine through the waterway potential military targets.

A missile boat from Russia's Black Sea Fleet carried out live firing of anti-ship cruise missiles at a target ship in the northwestern part of the Black Sea, Russia's defense ministry said in a statement on Telegram.

"The target ship was destroyed as a result of a missile strike," it said.

Ships and fleet aviation had also worked out actions to isolate the area temporarily closed to navigation, and also carried out a set of measures to detain offending ships, it added.

It did not specify exactly where the exercise had taken place.

After pulling out of the Black Sea grain deal, the Kremlin said on Wednesday it would consider cargo ships destined for Ukraine via the Black Sea potential military targets.

Moscow on Wednesday also banned traffic on the northwestern and southeastern parts of the sea.

Ukraine also said it had prohibited navigation on "the northeastern part of the Black Sea and the Kerch Strait" near Crimea, making navigation in most of the Black Sea perilous for vessels.

On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed the country's ambassador to the United Kingdom, Vadym Prystaiko.

On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces are using US-supplied cluster munitions, the White House said.

The United States provided the weapons to Ukraine for the first time earlier this month.

The weapons, which disperse up to several hundred small explosive charges that can remain unexploded in the ground, are banned by many countries because of the long-term risks they pose to civilians.

Telling illustration

Foreign Policy magazine criticized on Wednesday that Washington's controversial decision to supply Ukraine with cluster munitions is a telling illustration of liberalism's limitations as a guide to the US' foreign policy.

"The administration's rhetoric extols the superiority of democracies over autocracies, highlights its commitment to a 'rules-based order', and steadfastly maintains that it takes human rights seriously. If this were true, however, it would not be sending weapons that pose serious risks to civilians and whose use in Ukraine it has criticized harshly in the past," the report said.

"But as it has on other prominent issues, those liberal convictions get jettisoned as soon as they become inconvenient. This behavior shouldn't surprise us: When states are in trouble and worried that they might suffer a setback, they toss their principles aside and do what they think it takes to win."

When they turn to foreign policy, liberals tend to divide the world into good states (those with legitimate orders based on liberal principles) and bad states (just about everything else) and blame most if not all the world's problems on the latter, it said.

Liberalism allows the US and its closest allies to tell themselves that what is good for them will be good for everyone else as well, but it has at least two serious flaws: universalist pretensions and fragility of liberal convictions, which have prevented the success rate of US foreign policy from any improvement, it added.

Agencies - Xinhua