On Friday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin pushed back on Ukraine’s requests to use US and other NATO-provided weapons to launch long-range strikes inside Russian territory.
At a meeting of Ukraine’s backers at the Ramstein airbase in Germany, Austin was asked if the US would allow long-range strikes and said “no one capability” would be a game changer for Ukraine.
“I don’t believe that one specific capability is going to be decisive,” he said. “Our approach to integrating things and to making sure that they have the right skill sets to employ those capabilities and those capabilities are linked to specific objectives.”
Austin said Russia has moved back some of its military assets, so they’re out of range of Ukraine’s ATACMS, US-provided missiles with a range of about 190 miles. He noted that Ukraine has drones that can hit targets further inside Russia than the ATACMS and the British-provided Storm Shadow missiles, which can hit targets up to 155 miles away.
“I think Ukraine has a pretty significant capability of its own to address targets that are well beyond the range of ATACMS or even Storm Shadow for that matter,” Austin said. “There are a lot of targets in Russia, a big country, obviously. And there’s a lot of capability that Ukraine has in terms of UAVs and other things to address those targets.”
During the meeting of Ukraine’s Western backers, known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, Zelensky made another pitch for permission to carry out long-range strikes. “We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the divided territory of Ukraine, but also on the Russian territory, so that Russia is motivated to seek peace,” the Ukrainian leader said. “We need to make Russian cities and even Russian soldiers think about what they need: peace or Putin.”
Back in May, President Biden gave Ukraine the greenlight to use US-provided weapons in strikes on Russian border regions, which marked a significant escalation of the proxy war. A few months later, on August 6, Ukraine launched its invasion of Russia’s Kursk Oblast, where it is using US armored vehicles, missiles, and bombs.
Russia has been strongly warning against the next potential escalation, which would be Ukraine using ATACMS and other longer-range NATO-provided missiles to hit areas in Russia beyond Kursk and other border regions.
