Wednesday’s drone incident over the Kremlin was a “hostile act”, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday, warning that Russia would respond with “concrete actions”, Reuters, EFE and AFP reported.

On Wednesday, Russia accused Ukraine of launching two drones into the Kremlin to kill President Vladimir Putin and said a day after the incident that the United States was behind the alleged attack. Ukraine denied involvement in the incident, and the White House rejected Russian “lies.”

“We will not answer through discussions whether it was a casus belli.” We will respond with concrete actions,” the head of Russian diplomacy said at a press conference in Goa, on India’s west coast, where he is participating in a ministerial meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

“Casus belli” is a Latin term for a political or military action that could lead to war.

Lavrov: “It was a hostile act”

“It was clearly a hostile act, and it is absolutely obvious that the terrorists in Kyiv could not have committed it without the knowledge of their masters,” Lavrov said at the same press conference. Regarding retaliatory actions, the Russian minister said that Moscow “has a lot of patience”, recalling the Russian proverb, according to which Russians “tend to work hard, but when they do, they do it quickly”, reports TASS.

Moscow accuses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi and his government of being a “tool” of the US and its allies, EFE notes.

The conflict in Ukraine cannot be resolved only by freezing the situation on the Donbas (eastern) front, as “everyone understands the geopolitical nature of what is happening,” Lavrov also said.

Without solving the main geopolitical problem, which he defined as the desire of the West to maintain its hegemony and “dictate its will to everyone”, it is impossible to solve any crisis “neither in Ukraine nor in other parts of the world”, said the Russian minister.

“I have never denied the need to solve the problems that arose as a result of the actions of the US and its satellites regarding the arming of Ukraine with weapons for confrontation with Russia,” Sergey Lavrov said.