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Key Points
- US President Joe Biden will allow Ukraine to use US-provided long-range weapons to strike Russia.
- The decision follows Russia’s deployment of North Korean ground troops to supplement its own forces.
- Russia has warned that it would see a move to loosen the limits on Ukraine’s use of US weapons as a major escalation.
United States President Joe Biden’s administration will allow Ukraine to use US-provided weapons to strike into Russian territory, three sources familiar with the matter said, in a significant change to Washington’s policy in the conflict.
Ukraine plans to conduct its first long-range attacks in the coming days, the sources said, without revealing details due to operational security concerns.
The White House declined to comment.
The move by the US two months before follows months of requests by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to allow Ukraine’s military to use US weapons to hit Russian military targets far from its border.
The change follows to supplement its own forces, a development that has caused alarm in Washington and Kyiv.
The first deep strikes are likely to be carried out using ATACMS rockets, which have a range of up to 300 km, according to the sources.
While some US officials have expressed scepticism that allowing long-range strikes will change the war’s overall trajectory, the decision could help Ukraine at a moment when and possibly put Kyiv in a better negotiating position when and if ceasefire talks happen.
It is not clear if Trump will reverse Biden’s decision when he takes office. Trump has long criticised the scale of US financial and military aid to Ukraine and , without explaining how.
Still, some congressional Republicans have urged Biden to loosen the rules on how Ukraine can use US-provided weapons.
Russia has warned that it would see a move to loosen the limits on Ukraine’s use of US weapons as a major escalation.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s national grid operator said all regions would experience temporary restrictions on power following Russia’s massive air strike on the energy system.
Russia unleashed its largest air attack on Ukraine in almost three months on Sunday, killing seven people and further hobbling an already damaged energy system.
In a statement, Ukrenergo said workers were repairing damages as quickly as possible.
After Sunday’s strike, Ukrainian officials had confirmed damage to critical infrastructure or power cuts in regions from Volyn, Rivne, and Lviv in the west to Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia in the southeast.
The extent of the damage was hard to assess because authorities reveal little about the outcome of strikes and the state of the energy grid, which Russia had targeted in an air campaign earlier this year.
Russia’s defence ministry said it had launched a massive strike on energy facilities that supply Ukraine’s military-industrial complex.
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