The Pentagon Is Embedded in the War of Ukraine: Why should Ukraine be Constrained in its Battle with the Army Tactical Missile System?
In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin argued that Ukraine’s military was incapable of deploying sophisticated long-range weapons without direct input from NATO specialists. The NATO countries are at war with Russia, Putin said.
The argument from Ukraine and its Western supporters is this: If Russia is not constrained in battering every corner of Ukraine, as it demonstrated on Sunday, why should Ukraine be constrained in its fight? The Army Tactical Missile System, which Ukraine has already been using in Russian occupied territory, has a limited range of 190 miles, so that would cause a lot of Russian bases, ammunition storage areas and logistical issues. It could be very useful in getting Russia to withdraw from the area that it is preparing to take back from Ukraine. That is where the North Koreans are supposed to be deployed.
He would have done it in any case, since Russia was about to throw 10,000 North Korean troops into the war and they had just launched their largest air attack on Ukraine in months.
Acceding to Ukraine’s longstanding pleas for permission to fire American missiles into Russian territory may be the last thing President Biden can do for the Ukrainians — or on any other foreign front, for that matter — before leaving office. Biden had resisted the policy shift for many years because he thought it would plunge America into a confrontation with Russia.
MOSCOW — Ukraine has fired six ATACMS missiles into Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday, marking the first attack using the U.S.-made longer-range weapons in 1,000 days of war.
The barrage appears to be the result of the Biden administration’s decision — which NPR and other news outlets have reported — to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of sophisticated long-range Western weaponry to target inside Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday if the media reports were true that Ukraine now has U.S. approval to use Western weapons to strike deep inside Russia, that would spark a “new spiral of tensions” with Washington.
The new doctrine, which Putin announced in September, would consider a conventional-weapons attack by a nonnuclear state that’s supported by a nuclear-armed nation as a joint attack on Russia that could meet the conditions for a nuclear response.
The Russian nuclear doctrine and possible Ukrainian strikes come about two months before President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office in Washington.
In his campaign for the presidency, Trump criticized the amount of U.S. aid for Ukraine and repeatedly suggested he would seek a swift negotiated end to the war in Ukraine with Moscow.