Aljazeera :
There was a faint glimmer of hope in the past week for Ukraine, that after months of pleading with Washington, it may be starting to move the strategic needle in favour of allowing deep strikes inside Russia using weapons made in the United States.
Until now, the US has allowed Ukraine to use its weapons for counter-battery fire at short range across the border.
On the same day, his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, told reporters in London that he and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy “will be listening very intently on this and reporting back,” during a joint visit to Kyiv this week.
Biden and British premier Keir Starmer were to discuss the issue on Friday. “We have continuously adjusted and adapted based on battlefield conditions,” Blinken said.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul went further. He believed Blinken would actually deliver the news to Ukraine that restrictions were lifted.
“What I’ve seen and what I’ve been briefed on, it looks like that’s the message they’re going to give them, that they can use them cross-border,” McCaul said. “It sounded promising to me.”
These statements amounted to a change of tone from Washington, after months of insisting there would be no change in policy – something US defence secretary Lloyd Austin repeated on Friday, saying the 300km-range (185-mile) Army Tactical Missiles Ukraine wants to use inside Russia would not change the course of the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said that if NATO countries authorised strikes deep inside Russia, they would effectively be involved in the war.
“This is not a question of allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons or not. It is a question of deciding whether or not NATO countries are directly involved in a military conflict,” Putin told Russian state TV.
“If this decision is taken, it will mean nothing less than the direct involvement of NATO countries, the United States and European countries in the war in Ukraine. This will be their direct participation, and this, of course, will significantly change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict.”
Western weapons have been used since the beginning of the war to sink Russian ships, strike Russian artillery, down Russian planes and take out Russian tanks.
NATO countries have also provided the Ukrainian armed forces with target co-ordinates. But Putin said NATO personnel would now be programming flight paths into NATO-built missiles, and that marked an escalation.
Would Russia go nuclear?
Western self-restraint has been underpinned by a fear of Russia using nuclear weapons. But on Sunday, CIA director William Burns poured cold water on Moscow’s threats.
“Putin’s a bully. He’s going to continue to sabre-rattle from time to time,” Burns said, seated beside the head of Britain’s MI6 in London during a media event. “We cannot afford to be intimidated by that sabre-rattling.”
Russia had already passed the moment in the war when the usefulness of tactical nuclear weapons was assessed and dismissed, he said.
“There was a moment in the fall of 2022 when I think there was a genuine risk of potential use of tactical nuclear weapons,” Burns said. “I never thought … we should be unnecessarily intimidated by that.”
A successful Ukrainian counteroffensive recaptured at least 8,000 square kilometres (3,090 square miles) from Russian occupiers in the northern Kharkiv region in late August and early September of 2022.
On November 9 that year, as Ukraine rapidly advanced along the Dnipro river, threatening to cut off some 30,000 Russian troops on the right bank, Russia pulled back from 1,170sq km (450sq miles) in the southern Kherson region. Russia also lost more than 700sq km (270sq miles) in the eastern Donetsk region.