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Ukraine on Monday welcomed a decision by the Biden administration to allow long-range strikes inside Russia with American-provided missiles, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggesting that the first launches would come soon and without warning.
Ukraine has long argued that firing at targets deeper inside Russia would allow its military to fight with hands untied, and has positioned it as a just response to years of Russian bombardments. Ukraine is now facing a combined Russian and North Korean offensive against its troops in territory it captured in the Kursk region of southern Russia over the summer, and the addition of troops from Pyongyang appeared to be the development that persuaded the White House to shift its stance on long-range missiles. The North Korean deployment alarmed the US and European nations, as a widening of the war and by drawing Russian allies directly into the ground combat.
Zelenskyy, speaking in his address to the nation Sunday, suggested there would be no warning of the first launches. "Blows are not inflicted with words," he said. "Such things are not announced. The rockets will speak for themselves."
In Moscow, the Kremlin said the US decision to allow Ukrainian forces to strike targets in Russia was a major step toward a direct confrontation between Russia and Nato and adds "fuel to the fire". "This escalates tensions to a qualitatively new level," the Kremlin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said Monday. The decision represented "a qualitatively new situation in terms of the US' involvement in this conflict," he added, referring to the war in Ukraine.
The shift in the White House stance will allow Ukraine to use a ballistic missile system called ATACMS, an abbreviation for Army Tactical Missile System. With a range of 300km, these missiles would allow Ukraine to strike military targets that it says would degrade Russia's military, such as garrisons, logistical hubs and munitions depots that are beyond the reach of its conventional weapons. Calling these installations fair targets by the laws of war, the Zelenskyy government had for months asked for broad leeway in hitting these sites, but the Biden administration resisted. The arrival of North Korean troops apparently tipped the scales in favour of approval.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research organisation, released a map plotting 225 military installations within the range of ATACMS, including missile brigades, storage facilities, radar installations, airfields used to stage attack helicopters, repair depots, ammunition warehouses and logistics hubs.
The Biden government agreed last year to supply several hundred ATACMS to the Ukrainians for use on Ukraine's own territory, including the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula. The Ukrainian military has since used many of these missiles in a campaign of strikes on military targets in Crimea and it is unclear how many missiles remain in Ukraine's arsenal.
