Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has left Washington D.C. without securing U.S. President Joe Biden’s permission to use long-range Western missiles to strike deep into Russia.
Zelensky has been pushing the United States and its other Western allies to give the green light for Ukraine to fire deeper into Russian territory, to target weapons depots and other military locations. However, they have only allowed the use of the missiles they provided to Kyiv to be targeted against Russian territories near the border with Ukraine.
No mention was made about the issue during Biden and Zelensky’s press conference on Thursday, September 26th. The U.S. has been cautious, and doesn’t want to provoke Russia, whose president, Vladimir Putin recently announced a revision to Moscow’s nuclear doctrine.
According to the new doctrine, Kyiv firing Western cruise missiles or other conventional weapons en masse into Russia would be regarded as a joint attack by nuclear powers on the country, and authorise the Kremlin to use its nuclear arsenal at will.
An assessment by the U.S. intelligence, cited by The New York Times, believes that Russia is likely to retaliate with greater force against the United States and its coalition partners, possibly with lethal attacks, if they agree to give the Ukrainians permission to employ U.S., British and French-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia.
Some of these missiles—American-made ATACMS, British-made Storm Shadow missiles, and French-supplied SCALP missiles—have already been used by the Ukrainians to strike Russian military targets in and around the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014.
But the intelligence assessment also questions whether long-range missiles fired into Russia would change the course of the war between Ukraine and Russia that has been raging for more than two-and-a-half years. The Ukrainians currently have limited numbers of these weapons and it is unclear how many more, if any, the Western allies would provide.
Zelensky and the Ukrainian leadership have been trying to prove that Moscow’s “red lines” are nothing more than a bluff, citing the Ukrainian incursion into the Russian Kursk region as evidence, saying that attacking Russia has no consequences, despite threats made by Putin.
Nevertheless, Joe Biden has pledged nearly $8 billion in further military aid to Ukraine. “Today, I am announcing a surge in security assistance for Ukraine and a series of additional actions to help Ukraine win this war,” the president said in a statement. The new aid package includes the first deliveries to Kyiv of precision-guided missiles which have a range of about 130 kilometres and will make it easier for Ukraine to hit Russian forces at a distance.
Zelensky is meeting the Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump in New York on Friday. Trump has questioned why the United States has given billions of dollars to Ukraine, and has vowed to end the war as soon as possible if he returns to the White House. He also said at a campaign rally that Ukraine should have ceded some of its territory to Russia in exchange for peace.
