How will US nod to Ukraine to use long-range missiles on Russia impact the war?

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the verge of completing 1,000 days, outgoing US President Joe Biden has taken a crucial decision — allowing Kyiv to use long-range missiles supplied by Washington to strike deep into Russian territory as opposed to their use so far, in defence, within Ukrainian borders.

The decision comes at an extremely crucial juncture for Kyiv. Biden is two months away from handing over his all-powerful seat to Donald Trump, who has promised more than once to put an end to the war, though without spelling out the specifics. For one thing, he is expected to stop supplying military aid to Kyiv.

Therefore, this decision may be seen as a final leg-up to Ukraine from Biden so that it may use this as a bargaining chip if peace talks take place anytime soon. However, though the topic of peace talks has cropped up several times, with India being suggested as the mediator by several quarters, including both Russia and Ukraine, there has been no visible progress on that front yet.

Notably, the permission to use Western long-range missiles to strike military targets in Russia was also part of the “victory plan” laid down by Ukraine last month. The bigger idea in the “victory plan” — a formal invitation to Ukraine to join NATO — was quite unceremoniously dismissed by most NATO members, especially while the war was still on.

There is another reason for the change in US policy though. It reportedly comes in response to the deployment of North Korean troops in the Kursk region to help Russia regain the about 1,000 sq km of its territory Ukraine has been occupying since August.

“Russia has involved North Korea in its war—and the reaction [from the rest of the world] has been weak. Russia has continued its terror for nearly 1,000 days—and the world’s decisions are still delayed,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on X on Monday (November 18).

Monday morning also “began with one of the largest Russian strikes on Ukraine”, he wrote in the post, with 210 missiles and drones being launched targeting civilian infrastructure, including critical facilities such as power plants and transformers. With another harsh winter — the third since the invasion in February 2022 — imminent, Ukraine is already suffering from major energy shortfalls.

In Kursk, some 180 km from Ukraine’s north-eastern border near Kharkiv, some 11,000 North Korean soldiers have been moved, Ukraine had earlier estimated. Together with Russian troops, they are expected to launch an assault on Ukrainian forces there anytime.

Ukraine has been using these long-range missiles — Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) — to strike Russian targets within its occupied territory for more than a year. The Lockheed Martin ATACMS can strike targets up to 300 km away.

In comparison, the missiles being used by both sides so far range from 22 to 80 km. The strongest Russia has used so far is the BM-30 Smerch, which has a range of 70 km, says the BBC.

The US had not allowed long-range missile strikes within Russian territory because it feared an escalation of the war. Kurt Volker, a former US ambassador to Nato, told the

BBC that the decision to limit the use of ATACMS had been “done out of fear of provoking Russia”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has also warned NATO countries against supplying weapons to Ukraine to hit Russia, saying that would be viewed as their “direct participation” in the war. “This will mean that NATO countries, the USA and European states, are fighting with Russia,” he said in September.

However, Ukraine had already used US-supplied long-range missiles to strike Russian targets in its east last month, Zelenskyy had confirmed. It was done in a desperate bid to push back slowly advancing Russian troops in the eastern Donetsk region towards Pokrovsk, which acts as a major supply hub for Ukrainian forces.

While Zelenskyy has merely said that the “missiles will speak for themselves”, it’s not clear how far Ukraine will go with them. It may use the ATACMS only to defend Kursk, targeting key Russian military bases, infrastructure, and ammunition storage. Or it may choose to strike other targets too.

It is also not clear how many missiles Ukraine has at its disposal. The Pentagon has reportedly warned that it cannot make many of these missiles available to Ukraine.

But the US nod may encourage the UK and France to grant Ukraine similar permission to use their Storm Shadow missiles — similar to the American ATACMS — within Russia. However, neither has responded to Biden’s decision so far.

Also, with Russia already aware of the US’s decision, it has promptly moved its military equipment, such as fighter jets, further inside its territory, beyond the missiles’ range.

Therefore, what the US nod can at most do is give Ukraine a morale-booster at a time when nothing seems to be going for it. Serhiy Kuzan, chairman of the Kyiv-based Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre, told the BBC that it would not change the course of the war, but “it will make our forces more equal”.

And, as a Western diplomat told the BBC, it can raise the war cost for Russia.

While Putin is yet to comment on the development, senior Kremlin politicians have described it as a “serious escalation”. The Russian Tass news agency quoted that country’s statesman and politician Vladimir Dzhabarov as saying that “this is a very big step towards the start of World War 3”.

“The west has decided on such a level of escalation that it could end with the Ukrainian statehood in complete ruins by morning,” Andrei Klishas, a senior member of Russia’s upper house of parliament, reportedly said on the Telegram messaging app.

However, with Trump set to officially take over as the US President in January, a lot of things are uncertain.

So far, the US has been Ukraine’s greatest arms supplier, delivering or committing to deliver weapons and equipment worth $55.5 billion from the start of the war on February 24, 2022 to the end of June 2024, according to German research organisation Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

If Trump indeed cuts off this massive weapons supply, Ukraine may lose a chunk of its arsenal in no time. What happens next is anybody’s guess.