(CN) — Outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden and his European allies are allowing Ukraine to use Western-supplied long-range missiles to strike targets inside Russia, a move that threatens to widen and intensify a war that marked its 1,000th day of bloodshed on Monday.
On Sunday, Western media cited White House sources saying Biden has given the green light to Ukraine’s use of ATACMS missiles inside Russian territory. The surface-launched supersonic powerful weapons can hit targets about 190 miles away.
The objective is to smash Russia’s troops, command centers and operations along its borders with Ukraine, particularly in the Ukrainian-controlled Kursk region of southern Russia. Deeper strikes into Russia are also on the table.
Some NATO allies, including France and the United Kingdom, also agreed to allow their missiles to hit inside Russia, news reports said. Italy and Germany, though, did not agree to such strikes.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has called missile attacks inside Russia the toughest of red lines and he’s vowed to hit back at NATO countries if it is crossed.
“It is clear that the outgoing administration in Washington intends to take steps to continue to add fuel to the fire and to further inflame tensions around this conflict,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told reporters. “This decision is reckless, dangerous, aimed at a qualitative change, a qualitative increase in the level of involvement of the United States.”
During a trip to Brazil on Monday, Biden did not speak about his U-turn on permitting Ukraine to launch the missiles against Russian territory.
But White House officials said the decision was a response to North Korea’s troop deployment to Russia’s Kursk region, parts of which are under control of Ukrainian forces following a surprise August incursion into the sparsely populated southern Russian region along Ukraine’s northern border.
North Korea’s soldier deployment “is certainly a driving factor behind Biden making this decision,” said Nona Mikhelidze, a Russia expert at the Istituto Affari Internazionali, an Italian think tank.
“But it’s also true that Biden has only two more months in his presidency, so he can make some decisions with more ease, though he should have come to this decision much earlier,” Mikhelidze said in a telephone interview. “It’s too late and too little.”
She said it remains possible Western leaders also will let Ukraine only hit targets in Kursk, leaving military bases and infrastructure deeper inside Russia intact.
This isn’t the first time Ukraine has been told it can strike Russian territory. In May, the U.S. and Germany gave the green light for Ukraine to use their weapons in Belgorad, a Russian region bordering Ukraine. Even before that May decision, Kyiv regularly bombed Russian borderland areas near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city and one that has been under siege since the start of the war.
In his regular evening message on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy welcomed the lifting of restrictions on hitting targets inside Russia and called for the shipment of more weapons to help Ukraine defeat Russia militarily.
“Time should be invested not in talking to someone in Moscow, but in really forcing Russia to end the war,” he said.
His message came amid a new Russian bombing campaign against Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, Odesa and Kharkiv. In recent days, the country has suffered some of the biggest missile and drone attacks yet. Meanwhile, Russian forces are making advances in key cities along the frontlines, raising alarm in Western capitals about a possible Ukrainian collapse.
“Every time such Russian strikes take place, we see how important it is that our partners do not leave Patriots and other systems in warehouses somewhere, but transfer them to exactly those people who can protect lives and need them,” Zelenskyy said.
Ukraine’s Western backers had been at odds for months over the use of long-range missiles, with some arguing Putin’s red lines are a pretense and others arguing hitting inside Russia could spark a bigger conflict and leave NATO directly at war with Russia.
Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were among those who previously opposed hitting targets inside Russia.
Unlike Biden, Scholz has not gone along with other NATO allies in authorizing the use of Germany’s Taurus missile system against Russia. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Scholz, a Social Democrat, has been hesitant about striking hard at Russia, a stance that’s been a point of deep contention in Europe.
He is likely to lose upcoming elections and Germany is expected to see a more hawkish Christian Democratic party take over. The three-way Scholz coalition government collapsed earlier this month over disagreements about Germany’s funding of Ukraine. Germany has been one of Ukraine’s main supporters in military equipment and financial aid.
Scholz broke ranks with fellow Western leaders and spoke with Putin by telephone three days ago in a bid to broker a peace deal. It was the first time the two leaders had spoken since December 2022, 10 months into Russia’s invasion.
This week’s hawkish turn by Western powers is seen as such a big escalation because the use of long-distance missiles requires assistance by the U.S. and its NATO allies; and in the eyes of the Kremlin, their deployment against Russia effectively makes Western governments active actors in the war and legitimate targets themselves.
In the West, the loudest war hawks argue Putin’s hand will only be weakened by wreaking havoc inside Russia. Less hawkish voices see such a strategy doing little to improve Ukraine’s faltering position on the battlefield and argue it may wind up giving Russia even more reason to pummel Ukraine.
Mikhelidze said the Western strategy to provide Ukraine with just enough military might to keep its frontlines from breaking down has not worked and that Russia needed to be hit harder from the moment it invaded its southern neighbor.
She said the West hoped to force Russia to the negotiating table through a war of attrition where it was prevented from gaining any new Ukrainian territory.
Instead, she said Western powers should have been hitting inside Russia from the outset.
Many military analysts say Russia proved to be as resilient — and even more so — than Ukraine and its Western powers in a drawn-out war of attrition.
“It was abnormal for the war to be concentrated only on Ukraine’s territory,” she said.
Consequently, Biden’s Ukraine strategy is in danger of disastrously failing because the war is tilting decidedly toward Putin’s favor.
In a bitter twist for Western leaders, Russia’s economy has grown from a wartime boom and defied the sanctions prison imposed by Washington; Moscow’s bonds with China, India and the Global South are much stronger than before the war; and in a gut punch to American dominance, much of the world has refused to go along with Washington’s attempt at isolating Russia. Putin, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has even begun traveling outside Russia for summits with other leaders.
All of this underscores a clear touch of desperation in Biden’s move to authorize strikes inside Russia — making it seem like he’s attempting a last quarter hail mary to take the war to Russia and make it reel back in pain and defeat.
Over the past year, Ukraine has suffered a string of battlefield defeats and it is on the retreat across the frontlines.
And most bitter of all for Biden was the reelection of Donald Trump, who has vowed to unravel Biden’s Ukraine policy and come to a peace agreement with Putin that could see Ukraine forced into painful concessions.
Trump’s return to the White House on Jan. 20 is expected to decisively shift the war. Trump is famously friendly toward Putin and skeptical of NATO.
However, Mikhelidze said it remained far from clear how the war would proceed because Putin is unlikely to agree to ending it along the current battlelines.
“I don’t think that Putin will agree to freezing the conflict because for him it’s not about Donbass or Crimea, the territories which he already had before 2022, since 2014,” she said. “It is about the control of Kyiv.”
“At this point, we see that the war continues and the war will continue,” she said.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.