Can Ukraine attack inside Russia? Kyiv wants US to say yes.
As Russian forces bear down on the region that is home to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Defense Department officials say they are rushing U.S. arms into the country as quickly as they can.
The United States has provided Kyiv with artillery shells and missiles, including a 200-mile-range variant of the Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, which Ukraine began using last month. These are now allowing Kyiv to hit Russian bases – and supply hubs – behind the front lines in Ukrainian territory.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onU.S. military aid is reaching Ukraine with much-needed ammunition. But Kyiv wants to use Western weapons to hit inside Russia. Is that a necessary strategy or a dangerous escalation?
U.S. officials provided ATACMS only after extracting promises from Kyiv that it wouldn’t use them to strike inside Russia.
Now the new big ask among Ukrainian officials is permission from Washington to rescind these promises. Allowing broader use of Western weapons could swing momentum in Kyiv’s direction, supporters say, and signal unequivocally that it is America’s strategic objective that Ukraine beats Russia and wins this war.
“There’s a clear tension between helping Ukraine do absolutely everything that it might want to do to win the war, and the risks of escalation,” says Emma Ashford, a senior fellow in the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank focusing on global peace.
As Russian forces bear down on the region that is home to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Defense Department officials say they are rushing U.S. arms into the country as quickly as they can.
It has helped that in the months it awaited congressional approval to send $60 billion in military equipment and weapons for Kyiv, the Pentagon prepositioned what it could to deliver as soon as lawmakers gave the green light, which happened late last month.
Still, the delay was detrimental, as Kyiv’s front-line troops, among other travails, were forced to ration ammunition. “They did suffer from that,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said last week, “and we did see them lose some territory to the Russians.”
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onU.S. military aid is reaching Ukraine with much-needed ammunition. But Kyiv wants to use Western weapons to hit inside Russia. Is that a necessary strategy or a dangerous escalation?
The latest aid includes artillery shells – which will be a welcome arrival, since Ukrainian officials estimate that Russia outnumbers them about 10-to-1 in these supplies – as well as much-needed missiles for air defense systems.
The United States has also quietly provided Kyiv with a 200-mile-range variant of the Army Tactical Missile System, known as ATACMS, which Ukraine began using last month. These are now allowing Kyiv to hit Russian bases – and supply hubs – behind the front lines in Ukrainian territory.
This comes on the heels of more than a year of debate about whether such missiles would lead to a dangerous escalation of the war, particularly if Ukraine used them to strike inside Russia. U.S. officials provided the weapons only after extracting promises from Kyiv that this wouldn’t happen.
Now the new big ask among Ukrainian officials – including some who visited Capitol Hill recently – is permission from Washington and other Western allies to rescind these promises. Allowing broader use of Western weapons could swing momentum in Kyiv’s direction, supporters say, and signal unequivocally that it is America’s strategic objective that Ukraine beats Russia and wins this war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week that Moscow’s “biggest advantage” in the war is Kyiv’s ban on using Western-provided weapons to hit Russia proper.
Western officials are slowly starting to relent, as they did with supplying long-range missiles. “Just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine, you can quite understand why Ukraine feels the need to make sure it’s defending itself,” British Foreign Secretary David Cameron said during a visit to Kyiv earlier this month, adding that Ukraine had “the right” to use its weapons to strike back.
It was a notable change of policy – so notable, in fact, that it prompted some nuclear saber rattling from Moscow, which on May 6 announced military drills involving tactical nuclear weapons on the border with Ukraine.
Yet unsettling though veiled Kremlin threats may be, some defense analysts argue – without being cavalier about nuclear risk, they are quick to add – that in potentially allowing themselves to be governed by their greatest fears about Russian retaliation, Western leaders risk succumbing to intimidation.
“Our problem all along is that we have been deterring ourselves over the possibility that Russia might use a nuclear weapon,” says retired Lt. Gen. Frederick “Ben” Hodges, former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe. “And the Russians see that we are deterred.”
A fine line between assisting and risking escalation
For now, Russia is able to take advantage of Western arms restrictions to create sanctuaries just outside Ukraine’s borders to shield its ammunition, fuel depots, radars, motor pools, and more from Ukrainian strikes, the Institute for the Study of War warned last week.
Most recently, Russia has been using these spaces to assemble significant force on its side of the border, the institute reports. Some of these forces recently moved into Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, where Russian President Vladimir Putin says he plans to create a buffer against Ukrainian shelling.
While Mr. Putin says he does not intend, in this latest offensive, to take Kharkiv, it is certainly an effort to force Kyiv to spread its troops thin, analysts say.
As devastating as these developments are for Ukraine’s war effort, however, U.S. officials are mindful that moves like lifting U.S. weapons restrictions, which would be beneficial for Kyiv, are not necessarily good for Washington, notes Emma Ashford, a senior fellow in the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank focusing on global peace.
“There’s a clear tension between helping Ukraine do absolutely everything that it might want to do to win the war, and the risks of escalation,” she says. “I think the Biden administration for the most part has been quite sensible on this.”
While “a small number of limited strikes inside Russia does not seem to be terribly escalatory, I think the fear is that it’s a slippery slope.”
What’s more, Russian retaliation doesn’t have to be nuclear to be troubling, Dr. Ashford adds, pointing to sabotage campaigns such as jamming GPS systems and even warehouse arson that the Kremlin is suspected of ramping up in Western Europe.
Aid packages offer “practical help”
There are the practical concerns as well. Biden administration officials have prevailed on Kyiv to halt its drone hits on oil refineries inside Russia, since they raise prices of global energy – and of domestic gas.
Officials in Kyiv have ignored these entreaties, arguing that they are necessary to extract some price from Russia for its attacks on Ukraine’s energy sector – which has been left vulnerable, they add, by a dearth of air defenses.
Allies are endeavoring to address these shortfalls with the latest aid packages, which include air defenses.
The aid will also be helpful in repelling a ferocious glide bombing campaign that Moscow has lately been waging in order to overwhelm and exhaust Ukraine’s dwindling air defenses.
The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) has dubbed these simple bombs – which are essentially Soviet-era munitions with wings and a modern navigation system – Russia’s “wonder weapon,” noting that they are “near impossible” for Ukraine to intercept at the moment.
Fighter jets would be the best option to take on the glide bombers, CEPA says, but they have yet to be transferred to Kyiv as Ukrainian pilots continue to undergo flight training.
At a meeting of top NATO officers in Brussels last week, the chair of the alliance’s military committee, Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer, acknowledged delays in weapons deliveries, and that promises to provide equipment must also come with concrete plans to get them to Ukraine.
“I think that is something that needs to improve,” he said Friday, adding that a number of chiefs of defense at the NATO talks agreed. “I think we’ll see now that there is practical help on its way.”
