Freed from restraints, Ukraine is poised to strike into Russia

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine signaled a new sense of urgency Monday following a decision by the Biden administration to allow long-range strikes inside Russia using U.S.-provided missiles, with Ukrainian politicians suggesting that the first launches would come soon and without warning.

With two months left in his administration, President Joe Biden finally relented after months of pleas from Ukraine that it needed to fire at targets deeper inside Russia to more effectively degrade Moscow’s forces.

But hanging over Ukraine’s newfound freedom to attempt deeper strikes was the impending ascent of President-elect Donald Trump to the White House in January. It is unclear how much of the Biden administration’s approach to Ukraine will survive once Trump takes office, including this most recent shift.

Trump has been skeptical of continuing U.S. aid to Ukraine and has said he wants to bring about a quick resolution to the war — without saying how.

“The impact may be more political, albeit with a narrowing window of opportunity,” said Matthew Savill, military sciences director for the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense research organization. “The Ukrainians need to convince the incoming U.S. administration that they are still worth backing — in President Trump’s transactional view, a ‘good investment.’”

American officials said the missiles were likely to be deployed, at least initially, against combined Russian and North Korean troops in territory Ukraine has captured in the Kursk region of southern Russia. Ukraine invaded Kursk in part to take control of Russian land it could use as leverage in peace talks. It could deploy American missiles for longer-range strikes to try to safeguard its position before any negotiations Trump might push for.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking in his nightly address to the nation Sunday, suggested there would be no warning of the first launches.

“Blows are not inflicted with words,” he said. “Such things are not announced. The rockets will speak for themselves. They certainly will.”

In Moscow on Monday, the Kremlin said the Biden administration’s decision was a major step toward a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO.

“This escalates tensions to a qualitatively new level,” the Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters. He accused the Biden administration of “continuing to add oil to the fire and provoking the buildup of tensions.”

American officials and analysts said they did not expect the policy shift to substantially alter the course of the war, and pro-Kremlin commentators called the change a political decision aimed at reducing negotiating options for Trump.

“The Biden administration must surely understand that it is leaving Trump’s team not only the problem of solving the Ukrainian conflict, but an even bigger one: prevention of a global standoff,” said Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the lower chamber of the Russian parliament.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., sharply criticized the shift in policy. “The Military Industrial Complex seems to want to make sure they get World War 3 going before my father has a chance to create peace and save lives,” he wrote in a post on social platform X.

The shift in the White House stance will allow Ukraine to use a ballistic missile system called ATACMS, an abbreviation for Army Tactical Missile System. With a range of 190 miles, these missiles would allow Ukraine to strike targets that it says would degrade Russia’s military, such as garrisons, logistical hubs and munitions depots, that are beyond the reach of its artillery and shorter-range rockets.

The administration’s decision may clear the way for Britain and France to provide similar weapons for strikes into Russia.

The permission comes on the heels of months of bleak military setbacks for Ukraine along the front line. Short of troops, Ukraine has resorted to shifting soldiers to reinforce hot spots, leaving the areas they vacated vulnerable. Russia has advanced as much as a mile a day in the southern Donetsk region, its fastest pace since early in the war.

Away from the front, Russia has pummeled Ukrainian military and civilian targets with near nightly drone and missile barrages. In a daylight attack Monday afternoon, a Russian ballistic missile hit a residential neighborhood in Odesa, setting a building alight and killing at least 10 people and wounding another 43, local authorities said.

An attack Sunday night on the northeastern city of Sumy killed 11 people, including two children, and injured nearly 90 others, Ukrainian officials said.

The Biden administration agreed last year to supply several hundred ATACMS to Ukraine for use on Ukrainian territory, including the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. The Ukrainian military has since used many of these missiles in a campaign of strikes on military targets in Crimea, and it is unclear how many remain in its arsenal.

But Ukraine remained frustrated for months by the White House’s refusal to grant permission for longer-range strikes into Russian territory.

The addition of up to 10,000 North Korean troops to Moscow’s war effort this fall appeared to be what persuaded the White House to shift its stance. Their arrival alarmed the United States and European nations, who view it as widening the war by drawing Russian allies directly into the ground combat.

Hitting North Korean troops could discourage Pyongyang from sending more forces to Russia.

Ukrainian troops have held several hundred square miles of territory in the Kursk region for more than three months since launching an offensive this summer. Russia has clawed back some of this terrain and is now attacking with a force of about 50,000 troops, according to U.S. estimates. Ukraine claims to have repelled the first waves of this assault, destroying dozens of armored vehicles.

Some Ukrainians said the move came better late than never, but lamented the delay.

“It’s a pity it took 1,000 days and thousands of Ukrainian lives to make this decision,” said Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of parliament in the opposition European Solidarity party. “But it is an important decision, and we are thankful.”

A Ukrainian official familiar with the negotiations between Kyiv and Washington said Ukraine had been waiting and fighting for the decision for over a year. “We’ve always simply said that the greater our long-range capabilities, the faster we will defend Ukraine and end this war,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations.

In his comments to reporters Monday, Peskov referred to statements made by President Vladimir Putin in September, saying that Ukraine could only use such long-range systems with the help of NATO personnel and satellite guidance.

“This will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia,” Putin said during a government meeting in St. Petersburg.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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