By Illia Novikov, KYIV Ukraine
The Kremlin warned Monday
that President
Joe Biden’s decision to let Ukraine strike targets inside Russia with
U.S.-supplied longer-range missiles adds “fuel to the fire” of the war and would escalate
international tensions even higher.
Biden’s shift in policy
added an
uncertain, new factor to the conflict on the eve of the 1,000-day
milestone since Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022.
It also came as a Russian
ballistic missile with cluster munitions struck a residential area of Sumy in
northern Ukraine, killing 11 people and injuring 84 others. Another missile
barrage sparked apartment fires in the southern port of Odesa, killing at least
10 people and injuring 43, Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said.
Washington is easing limits on
what Ukraine can strike with its American-made Army
Tactical Missile System, or ATACMs, U.S. officials told The Associated
Press on Sunday, after months of ruling out such a move over fears of
escalating the conflict and bringing about a direct confrontation between
Russia and NATO.
The Kremlin was swift in its
condemnation.
“It is obvious that the
outgoing administration in Washington intends to take steps, and they have been
talking about this, to continue adding fuel to the fire and provoking further
escalation of tensions around this conflict,” spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Russia’s U.N. Ambassador
Vassily Nebenzia went further at a U.N. Security Council meeting marking 1,000
days of war, saying Moscow is “astounded” that the leaders of Britain and
France “are eager to play into the hands of the exiting administration and are
dragging not just their countries but the entire Europe into large-scale
escalation with drastic consequences.”
The scope of the new firing
guidelines isn’t clear. But the change came after the U.S., South Korea and
NATO said North
Korean troops are in Russia and apparently are being deployed to help
Moscow drive Ukrainian troops from Russia’s Kursk border region.
Biden’s decision almost
entirely was triggered by North Korea’s entry into the fight, according to a
U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal
deliberations, and was made just before he left for the Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation summit in Peru.
Russia also is slowly pushing
Ukraine’s outnumbered army backward in the eastern Donetsk region. It
has also conducted a
devastating aerial campaign against civilian areas in Ukraine.
Peskov referred journalists to
a statement from President Vladimir Putin in September in which he said
allowing Ukraine to target Russia would significantly raise the stakes.
It would change “the very
nature of the conflict dramatically,” Putin said at the time. “This will mean
that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war
with Russia.”
Peskov claimed that Western
countries supplying longer-range weapons also provide targeting services to
Kyiv. “This fundamentally changes the modality of their involvement in the
conflict,” he said.
Putin warned in June that
Moscow could
provide longer-range weapons to others to strike Western targets if
NATO allowed Ukraine to use its allies’ arms to attack Russian territory. After
signing a treaty with North Korea, Putin issued an explicit threat to provide
weapons to Pyongyang, noting Moscow could mirror Western arguments that it’s up
to Ukraine to decide how to use them.
“The Westerners supply weapons
to Ukraine and say: ‘We do not control anything here anymore and it does not
matter how they are used,’” Putin has said. “Well, we can also say: ‘We
supplied something to someone — and then we do not control anything.’ And let
them think about it.”
Putin has also reaffirmed
Moscow’s readiness to use nuclear weapons if it sees a threat to its
sovereignty.
Biden’s move will “mean the
direct involvement of the United States and its satellites in military action
against Russia, as well as a radical change in the essence and nature of the
conflict,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said.
President-elect Donald Trump,
who takes office Jan. 20, has raised uncertainty about whether his
administration would continue military support to Ukraine. He has also vowed to
end the war quickly.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy gave a muted response Sunday to the approval that he and his
government have request for over a year, adding: “The missiles will speak for
themselves.”
“The longer Ukraine can
strike, the shorter the war will be,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha
said Monday before the U.N. Security Council meeting marking the 1,000th-day
milestone.
Asked whether the United
Kingdom would follow the United States in authorizing use of its longer-range
missiles, U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who chaired the meeting, declined
to comment. He said doing so would risk “operational security and can only play
into the hands of Putin.”
France’s U.N. Ambassador
Nicolas De Riviere, whose country has also given Ukraine longer-range missiles,
told the Security Council without directly saying what his country will do that
“The right of Ukraine to its legitimate defense includes the possibility of
striking military targets involved in operations aimed at the territory.”
Ukraine’s Sybiha said a green
light from the U.S. to use longer-range missiles against Russia “could be a
game changer,” but others are less certain.
ATACMS, which have a range of
about 300 kilometers (190 miles), can reach far behind the about
1,000-kilometer (600-mile) front line in Ukraine, but they have relatively
short range compared with other types of ballistic and cruise missiles.
The policy change came “too
late to have a major strategic effect,” said Patrick Bury, a senior associate
professor in security at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.
“The ultimate kind of impact
it will have is to probably slow down the tempo of the Russian offensives which
are now happening,” he said, adding that Ukraine could strike targets in Kursk
or logistics hubs or command headquarters.
Jennifer Kavanagh, director of
military analysis at Defense Priorities, agreed the U.S. move would not alter
the war’s course, noting Ukraine “would need large stockpiles of ATACMS, which
it doesn’t have and won’t receive because the United States’ own supplies are
limited.”
On a political level, the move
“is a boost to the Ukrainians and it gives them a window of opportunity to try
and show that they are still viable and worth supporting” as Trump prepares to
take office, said Matthew Savill, director of Military Sciences at the Royal
United Services Institute in London.
The cue for the policy change
was the arrival in Russia of North Korean troops, according to Glib Voloskyi,
an analyst at the CBA Initiatives Center, a Kyiv-based think tank.
“This is a signal the Biden
administration is sending to North Korea and Russia, indicating that the
decision to involve North Korean units has crossed a red line,” he said.
Russian lawmakers and state
media bashed the West for what they called an escalatory step, threatening a
harsh response.
“Biden, apparently, decided to
end his presidential term and go down in history as ‘Bloody Joe,’” lawmaker
Leonid Slutsky told Russian news agency RIA Novosti.
Vladimir Dzhabarov, deputy
head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of parliament, called
it “a very big step toward the start of World War III” and an attempt to
“reduce the degree of freedom for Trump.”
Russian newspapers offered
similar predictions of doom. “The madmen who are drawing NATO into a direct
conflict with our country may soon be in great pain,” Rossiyskaya Gazeta said.
Some NATO allies welcomed the
move.
President Andrzej Duda of
Poland, which borders Ukraine, praised the decision as a “very important, maybe
even a breakthrough moment“ in the war.
“In the recent days, we have
seen the decisive intensification of Russian attacks on Ukraine, above all,
those missile attacks where civilian objects are attacked, where people are
killed, ordinary Ukrainians,” Duda said.
Easing restrictions on Ukraine
was “a good thing,” said Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna of Russian neighbor
Estonia.
“We have been saying that from
the beginning — that no restrictions must be put on the military support,” he
told senior European Union diplomats in Brussels. “And we need to understand
that situation is more serious (than) it was even maybe like a couple of months
ago.”
But Slovakian Prime Minister
Robert Fico, known for his pro-Russian views, described Biden’s decision as “an
unprecedented escalation” that would prolong the war.
