White House National Security Council spokesman Admiral John Kirby has described reports that a Russian cargo ship transported weapons from a port in South Africa to Russia in December as a “serious issue”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Speaking to Sky News, he said: “We have consistently and strongly urged countries not to provide any support for Russia’s war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We don’t believe that anybody should be making it easier for Mr Putin to kill innocent Ukrainian people, period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We’ve had multiple conversations at multiple levels, with multiple countries about those concerns, but obviously I’m not going to get into the diplomatic conversations themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“It’s a serious issue.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
America’s ambassador to South Africa said on Thursday that he was confident a Russian ship, the Lady R, had picked up weapons in the country last year, which would represent a breach of Pretoria’s declared neutrality in the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We are confident that weapons were loaded onto that vessel, and I would bet my life on the accuracy of that assertion,” Ambassador Rueben Brigety told journalists in South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa responded, saying his government would open an inquiry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The matter is being looked into and in time, we’ll be able to speak about [it],” the president said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
White House National Security Council spokesman Admiral John Kirby has described reports that a Russian cargo ship transported weapons from a port in South Africa to Russia in December as a “serious issue”. Speaking to Sky News, he said: “We have consistently and strongly urged countries not to provide any support for Russia’s war. “We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6716,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[220],"tags":[1042,2560,2021,1338],"class_list":["post-6715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-russia","tag-south-africa","tag-weapons","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6717,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6715\/revisions\/6717"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}