Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Iranian ambassador’s accreditation will be lifted and Iranian diplomatic staff in Kyiv will be reduced due to Russian forces using Iranian drones to attack Ukraine.
So far, Ukrainian forces had shot down a total of eight Iranian-made drones in the conflict, Zelenskyy said in a late-night video speech.
“Today the Russian army used Iranian drones for its attacks on the Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa regions. I have ordered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to respond strongly to this fact,” Zelenskyy said in his speech.
“Six of these Iranian drones were shot down by our eastern and southern commando air defenses. Another was shot down by Navy air defenses. And at this moment I am being informed of the downing of another Iranian strike drone by Southern Command air defenses,” he said.
“In response to such a hostile act, the Ukrainian side has decided to revoke the accreditation of the Iranian ambassador and to significantly reduce the number of diplomatic staff at the Iranian embassy in Kyiv,” he declared.
Iran has denied claims by Kyiv and Washington that it supplied drones to Russia, and officials in Tehran previously said Iran would not support either side in the war as it supported its solution through the dialogue.
Oleg Nikolenko, the spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, said in a tweet on Saturday that in response to arms sales to Russia, we “announced the revocation of the accreditation of the Iranian ambassador to Kyiv and a significant reduction in diplomatic staff at the Iranian Embassy.”
Ukraine’s foreign ministry said earlier that “the acting charge d’affaires of the Islamic Republic of Iran has been summoned to Ukraine,” Agence France-Presse reported. A statement by the ministry said that the envoy was told that the supply of Iranian weapons to Russia “is in direct contradiction with the neutrality, respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine” and that it was “an act rude that inflicts a severe blow on relations between Ukraine and Iran.”
The military authorities of southern Ukraine said in a statement that they shot down four Shahed-136 “kamikaze” unmanned aerial vehicles over the sea near the Odesa port. The military aviation separately stated that it had shot down a Mohajer-6, a larger Iranian drone, for the first time, according to the Ukrainska Pravda newspaper.
