All week long, the Biden administration has been hinting that it would authorize Ukraine to strike deep inside Russian territory with US-made Army Tactical Missiles Systems, or ATACMS. These are computer-guided supersonic missiles with a range of up to 190 miles. They can’t reach Moscow, but they could hit the Russian cities of Kursk, Voronezh, and Rostov. Britain has already authorized Ukraine to use British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles to attack Russia. Secretary of State Tony Blinken traveled to Kiev in the company of British Foreign Secretary David Lammy to discuss the matter with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. Some kind of escalatory announcement was expected to accompany British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Friday visit to Washington.
This development prompted Vladimir Putin to make a carefully worded statement to a TV interviewer Thursday: “If this decision is made, it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, the European countries, in the war in Ukraine. This changes the very nature of the conflict.” Starmer dismissed the remark. Putin, he said, can stop his war with Ukraine any time he wants. One could just as easily say that, any time they wanted, Starmer and Biden could stop risking Armageddon to meddle in the affairs of sovereign countries halfway around the world.
The more troubling thing is that Starmer doesn’t seem to understand what Putin is saying. Because, although the point is somewhat complex and the reporting on the West’s intentions has been cloudy, Putin is right.
Right about what? What is Putin complaining about? This ATACMS business seems like familiar ground. We have already armed the Ukrainians to the teeth. In Russian eyes, the American-initiated militarization of what had been a de facto buffer zone is what started the war in the first place. Although the Ukrainians have been doing a great deal of dying in this war, at several important junctures, they have seemed immaterial to a conflict that is really being fought by the United States.
Since 2022, almost every time Ukraine has suffered a serious strategic reversal, it has been followed by a stunning peripeteia: Ukraine sinks the Russian navy’s flagship in the Black Sea, Ukraine blows up the Kerch bridge in Crimea, Ukraine damages Russia military airfields in Crimea, Ukraine invades Russia proper and destroys two strategic bridges over the river Seym with pinpoint strikes. The United States then congratulates its ally on its resourcefulness, and implies that it would be disgraceful to betray Ukraine now, when it is fighting with such pluck.
It would be more accurate to put “Ukraine” in quotation marks. Leaving aside more mysterious high-tech operations, from drone attacks on top Russian officers unwise enough to carry their cell phones on the frontlines to the sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, these strikes have been done with precision-targeted missiles. And Ukraine doesn’t do precision. It cannot. When America decided to take Ukraine under its military wing a decade ago, the country had a lower per-capita income than Cuba, Jamaica, and Namibia, and defended its frontiers with oligarch-funded militias. It is true that Ukraine has since regained some of the missile-manufacturing capacity that it had during the Cold War, but the feats of precise destruction it has pulled off rely on imported technology.
Senior Biden officials confirmed to Joshua Yaffa of The New Yorker that they do targeting for the Ukrainians—but with care. “There are lines we drew,” one said, “in order not to be perceived as being in a direct conflict with Russia.” Note the word “perceived.” It has served Russia, too, to pretend not to notice what is going on, in the interest of avoiding direct conflict with the United States.
The resort to ATACMS would make such dissembling impossible. It’s a reckless crossing into flagrant war-making.
To see why this is the case, you have to understand the way ATACMS work. What makes ATACMS lethal isn’t just their payload and speed, but their GPS targeting. The weapon uses a dedicated system that the United States controls, drawing on a constellation of satellites run by the US military that operate together in real time. The Biden administration has sought to reassure the public that Ukrainians will have to present the United States with a target list. That goes without saying; they can’t fire them without the Americans. An ATACMS strike isn’t just moral or material support for a friend, who may be in the right or may be in the wrong. It is a deadly, unambiguously American-authored act of war. In suggesting that this would be a rash escalation, Putin is putting things mildly.
“Russia still has more nuclear warheads than any country on the planet.”
During last week’s presidential debate, Donald Trump’s warnings about the risk that World War III might start in Ukraine were lost in the flood of his own hyperbole—but he wasn’t wrong. Russia still has more nuclear warheads than any country on the planet, including the United States. Putin has sought to remind those killing his soldiers of this fact throughout the war. But intellectuals from one end of the Washington foreign-policy establishment to the other are feeling lucky. They have convinced themselves that Putin is “bluffing.” Maybe they are right. But a nuclear exchange isn’t the only bad outcome that could result from such a reckless military adventure.
This is all happening at a dangerous time. Constitutionally, if Biden, as commander in chief, wants to start a war, he must ask Congress to declare it. That formality hasn’t been honored since the middle of the last century, of course. But the president has always at least had to explain his rationale in some way. Right now, the president is insufficiently compos mentis to do that. He has been deemed mentally incapable (by his own Justice Department’s special counsel) of standing trial in a mishandling-of-documents case and physically incapable (by his own party) of managing a presidential campaign—a challenge considerably less arduous than a military campaign. With the elected commander-in-chief absent from the scene, awkward questions arise. Who is his regent? Who in this administration is escalating the Russia-Ukraine war by drawing the United States closer to active participation in it?