Western supplies of weapons to Ukraine could escalate the war to a 'new dimension', Russia's ambassador to the UK says

• Russia will scale up its war if the west keeps supplying Ukraine with weapons, its ambassador to the UK Andrei Kelin said Saturday.

• "This escalation will get a new dimension which we do not need and do not want," Kelin told the BBC.

• His warning came as a top Ukrainian official said the country was ready to launch a counter-offensive.

Russia is ready to escalate its war efforts if the West carries on supplying Ukraine with weapons, the Kremlin's ambassador to the UK said Saturday.

Andrei Kelin told the BBC that Western military aide would prolong the 15-month conflict – and warned that the longer that dragged on, the more likely Russia was to scale up its attacks.

"That depends on the efforts in escalation of war that is being undertaken by NATO countries, especially by the UK," he said, in response to a question the fighting would last.

"Sooner or later, this escalation might have a new dimension that we do not need and we do not want," he added.

"It is a big idealistic mistake to think that Ukraine will prevail. Russia is 16 times bigger than Ukraine," Kelin added. "We have enormous resources, and we haven't just started yet to act very seriously."

Kelin's warning came the same day that top Ukrainian defense official Oleg Danilov told the BBC that the country was ready to launch a long-expected counter-offensive "tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or in a week."

Russian politicians have repeatedly threatened escalation – most notably when president Vladimir Putin accused the West of "nuclear blackmail" in September last year.

"If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people," Putin said, appearing to hint at Russia using its own nuclear weapons. "This is not a bluff."

Elsewhere in his interview with the BBC, Kelin falsely claimed that Russia's war was merely a "special military operation" to depose a neo-Nazi regime, which he said had been set up in 2014.

He also refused to acknowledge the United Nations' documentation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine – and then said he was offended by interviewer Laura Kuenssberg's questioning when she pressed him on the subject.

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