President Joe Biden is signaling new openness in allowing Ukraine to fire missiles provided by the West on targets deep inside Russia, and plans to discuss the matter with his new British counterpart at the White House on Friday.
Ahead of the meeting, US officials said they did not expect Biden would immediately sign-off on allowing US-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems — known as ATACMS — to be launched on targets inside Russia far from the Ukrainian border.
But like the US, the United Kingdom has sent its own long-range Storm Shadow missiles to Kyiv. Their use, along with use of similar weapons from France, is currently limited to within Ukraine, and any change will require US sign-off — a matter for discussion at Friday’s talks.
The president has long resisted calls from Ukrainian officials to ease restrictions on the weapons. But as the war grinds on, and as the US watches with growing concern as Iran supplies Russia with ballistic missiles, intensive discussions have been underway at the White House about a potential change.
“We’re working that out right now,” Biden said when questioned this week whether he would permit Western-provided long-range missiles to target military sites like airfields, missile launchers, fuel tanks and ammunition depots inside Russia. The New York Times, citing European officials, reported that Biden appears to be on the verge of clearing the way for Ukraine to use long-range missiles as long as it doesn’t use arms provided by the US.
View this interactive content on CNN.comWithin the Biden administration, the debate has pitted some officials who support loosening the restrictions against others who appear more skeptical, wary both for the risk of escalation and the usefulness of such a move.
Some assessments show Russia has already moved its assets – particularly launch points for glide bombs, currently the biggest threat to Ukrainian troops in the Kursk border region – out of range of the long-range missiles.
On the eve of Biden’s meeting with the prime minister, US officials continued to insist that no change in policy was expected to be announced this week on Ukraine’s use of ATACMS. In light of growing public pressure to allow American-provided long-range missiles to be launched deeper into Russia, senior administration officials have stressed that the US does not believe that such a change would help change the overall course of the war.
And while US officials have had ongoing discussions about the use of long-range missiles by Ukraine with both their Ukrainian and UK counterparts, American officials said the topic was not poised to take up the majority of Friday’s Biden-Starmer meeting – despite high interest in the topic in recent days.
The two leaders were eager to discuss a “wealth of issues” as Starmer was beginning to get settled into the job, one US official said.
The National Security Council on Thursday declined to comment on whether Biden was preparing to give a thumbs-up to the use of the UK’s Storm Shadow missiles far inside Russian territory.
For Starmer, who was elected as part of his Labour Party’s landslide general election victory in early July, the meeting is an opportunity to further develop an important global relationship. He and Biden also met on the margins of a NATO summit in Washington over the summer.
That meeting took place one week after Starmer’s election as prime minister and two weeks before Biden would exit the race for re-election. Starmer, people familiar with the matter said, requested another face-to-face with Biden before he left office in a bid to forge ties between the two nations, with questions looming about what the special relationship could look like after November’s US election.
No announcements are expected to come out of the talks, people familiar with the matter said, and officials have said policy changes on the US weapons are not imminent.
Still, that the conversation over long-range weapons is happening at all is an indication of how stalled battlefield dynamics are causing western leaders to rethink their approach.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters Thursday that allowing Ukraine to use long-range missiles to strike Russia is a matter of deciding whether NATO countries are going to become directly involved in the military conflict.
If Western nations decide to allow Ukraine to use their long-range weapons, Putin said: “This will mean that NATO countries – the United States and European countries – are at war with Russia.”
The top American and British diplomats traveled to Kyiv this week and heard renewed pleas from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to allow his military to fire long-range weapons on Russian military sites.
American officials argue they constantly reevaluate their approach based on battlefield conditions. Although the US has shifted its policy to allow limited cross-border strikes into Russia using US-provided weapons, the administration has yet to allow longer-range strikes.
Asked about the concerns of escalation, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that they are one factor, but “certainly not the only factor, and it’s not necessarily a dispositive factor.”
“From day one, as you heard me say, we have adjusted and adapted as needs have changed, as the battlefield has changed, and I have no doubt that we’ll continue to do that as this evolves,” Blinken said at a news conference in Kyiv with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy.
The revelation that Iran has been providing Russia with ballistic missiles has changed the debate over Ukraine’s capabilities, Lammy said.
Other top American officials have sounded more skeptical. Last week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin pushed back on the notion that lifting the restrictions and hitting deeper into Russia is a silver bullet, saying that “there’s no one capability that will, in and of itself, be decisive in this campaign.”
“There are a lot of targets in Russia – a big country, obviously,” Austin said at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Germany on Friday. “And there’s a lot of capability that Ukraine has in terms of (unmanned aerial vehicles) and other things to address those targets.”
A US official said the administration views Ukraine’s long-range attacks on Crimea, and Russia’s naval fleet there, as a much more effective use of the ATACMS, and a strategy that has been yielding significant success in recent months.
The Defense Department has a limited stockpile of the long-range systems, the official said, so the US has been trying to persuade Ukraine to use them to the maximum effect possible rather than on disparate targets in Russia that the US considers to have little strategic value.
A separate US official said they expect Russia to continue to move assets out of reach of the long-range systems and noted that “several hundred” ATACMS have been transferred to Ukraine “and Ukraine has used most of them.”
Despite those reservations, a growing chorus of voices in Washington is calling for the restrictions to be lifted. Senior Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including its chairman Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, have said the restrictions should be eased in order to provide Ukraine a better chance of success.
“In light of Putin’s increasingly horrific attacks on civilian targets, it’s time to lift restrictions on the use of long-range US-provided weapons to allow Ukraine to reach high value Russian military targets,” Shaheen said.
Earlier in the week, the bipartisan congressional Ukraine caucus called on Biden to allow Ukraine to strike targets inside Russia with the long-range weapons.
“Unless these restrictions are lifted, Ukraine will continue to struggle to achieve victory in its fight to defend its sovereignty and its people. The Ukrainian people will continue to suffer unnecessary death, loss, and hardship as Russia capitalizes on this policy and escalates its bombardments across Ukraine,” the bipartisan lawmakers wrote.
A group of key House Republican also urged Biden to ease the restrictions in a letter on Monday. And in a separate open letter, 17 former national security officials, including former US ambassadors to Ukraine and top military commanders, called on Blinken and Lammy to “act with alacrity.”
“A change in policy cannot come soon enough,” they wrote.