American restrictions on hitting Russia are hurting Ukraine

UKRAINE’S FRUSTRATION is growing by the day over restrictions that the Biden administration has imposed on the use of American-supplied weapons against targets inside Russia.

As Russia launched massive missile and drone attacks on cities and energy infrastructure over two days last week (August 26th and 27th), Ukraine’s defence minister, Rustem Umerov, and President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, led a delegation to Washington as part of a fresh bid to get the policy changed. According to reports, the Ukrainian team was seeking permission to go after a specific number of high-value targets with American missiles.

Their mission is a direct response to the shifting excuses coming from the Pentagon and from national security officials about why the restrictions should hold while other supposed red lines have become blurred to the point of invisibility.

A blanket ban on hitting targets in Russia, for instance, was lifted in May, when Ukraine was told it could strike Russian troop concentrations on the other side of the border preparing to attack the city of Kharkiv. When, a month ago, the Ukrainians crossed into Kursk, they took with them HIMARS missile batteries that were deployed against Russian forces called in to repel the invasion. No objections were raised in Washington.

The reason given in the past for forbidding Ukraine from using American weapons against targets in Russia was that this could trigger an escalatory response from the Kremlin that would end up doing more harm to Ukraine and might even result in Russia resorting to nuclear weapons. However, that justification has become increasingly strained.

Vladimir Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling has been exposed as just that, while Russia has hardly held back in other ways. As Sir Lawrence Freedman, a military historian, says, the missile and drone attacks last week are part of a systematic campaign to make life as miserable as possible for ordinary Ukrainians this winter. “Russia,” he says, “wants hundreds of thousands to leave their homes, perhaps creating yet another refugee crisis in neighbouring European countries”.

In recent months, various new reasons for constraining Ukraine have been trotted out. Unnamed officials have suggested that the administration does not want to jeopardise a “reset” of relations with Moscow at some point in the future. Other officials argue that allowing Ukraine to use ATACMS, a longer-range system than HIMARS, against targets in Russia would not change the strategic picture because there are not enough targets in range. Russia has moved most of the aircraft used to launch powerful glide bombs to airfields beyond the 300km range of the ATACMS missile, and that it is anyway a scarce resource which is better employed against targets in Crimea.

It has also recently emerged that the administration has stopped Britain and France from allowing Ukraine to use the Storm Shadow/SCALP weapons they have provided outside Ukrainian territory. It has been able to do this because the cruise missile contains some American components.

Ben Hodges, a former commander of American forces in Europe, describes this as “constant excuse-making, which is both misleading and inaccurate”. It is not clear, for example, why inadequate numbers of ATACMS should be a restraint. A detailed report by Defence Express, a Ukrainian consulting firm, suggests that America probably holds stocks of at least 2,500 of the missiles, which first entered service more than 30 years ago.

The claim that there are not enough worthwhile targets is equally questionable. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think-tank, argues that “Ukrainian long-range strikes against Russian military targets within Russia’s rear are crucial for degrading Russian military capabilities throughout the theatre, and the lifting of restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Western-provided weapons would allow Ukrainian forces to strike a wide range of significant targets undergirding Russia’s war effort.”

The institute assesses that some 250 military “objects” are within range of ATACMS, of which only 17 are airfields from which  aircraft may have departed. Many of these are large military bases, communications stations, logistics centres, fuel depots and ammunition warehouses that would be hard to move without serious consequences for Russia’s war effort.

General Hodges, who remains a senior adviser to NATO on logistics, says there is “no moral or legal reason for not going after these targets”. He argues that Mr Biden gets much of his advice from Obama-era officials who repeatedly got Russia wrong. Unless Mr Biden changes his mind, “his legacy will be tainted”. Sir Lawrence concurs: The Americans are “caught in a trap of their own making and they don’t know how to get out of it”. But Mr Biden, he says, is  “a stubborn old man”.

Mr Zelensky will soon have a last chance to convince Mr Biden to adopt a new approach before he leaves office, when the two will meet next week in New York, on the fringes of the annual UN General Assembly.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are showing that they are capable of producing alternatives to Western systems. Their increasingly sophisticated long-range drones are regularly hitting targets deep inside Russia. On August 28th oil depots were struck in Rostov and Kirov provinces–up to 1,200km from the Ukrainian border. On September 1st, as part of one of Ukraine’s largest drone attacks of the war, an oil refinery near Moscow was hit.

Ukraine has even more powerful weapons in development. Mr Zelensky recently announced the successful test of Ukraine’s first ballistic missile. Fabian Hinz, a missile expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a London-based think-tank, says that it is probably an evolution of the Hrim-2 missile. On and off, it has been developed for nearly a decade, with some funding from Saudi Arabia. He reckons that it is no surprise Ukraine has the technical skills and industrial know-how to produce capable missiles. The country was once at the heart of Soviet programmes for strategic and cruise missiles. Ukraine boasts excellent young engineers and has already shown what it can do with a home-grown anti-ship cruise missile, called Neptune, as well as its land-attack version.

However, Ben Barry, a land-warfare specialist also at the IISS, warns that although Ukraine is already waging a “deep battle” against a variety of targets in Russia, it may struggle to scale up production of its long-range systems. Yet by showing what they can do, says Mr Barry, the Ukrainians make an even stronger case for being allowed to use ATACMS and Storm Shadow/SCALP against such targets. For now, as the Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, put it following last week’s onslaught against cities in Ukraine: “Russian planes are better protected by Western guarantees than are Ukrainian civilians.”■

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