By Ben Aris in Berlin
The Biden administration has secretly given Ukraine permission to strike targets inside Russia, but limited the permission to targets near Kharkiv on the Russian border, it was reported on May 30.
The reversal of the earlier ban is result of an intensified Russian assault on Ukraine’s second largest city by missiles and forces massed inside Russia that has been striking Kharkiv with impunity thanks to the ban on hitting targets inside Russian territory with Nato-sourced weapons.
“I think the time is right, and the boss (Biden) made the decision the time is right to provide these based on where the fight is right now,” Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told AP.
The permission comes as Ukraine has lost over 170 square kilometers in the face of the Russian onslaught due to an ammo crisis caused by tardy financial and military support that ended with the April passage of a new $61bn aid package. However, despite Washington’s new commitment, battlefield reports say that little of the promised materiel is arriving at the front. Increasingly frustrated, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been calling for permission to use the accurate and power missiles such as its HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to hit Russian supply logistics, Grad missile launchers and massed troops just over the border in Russia.
The Western efforts to resupply are going slowly, after Czechia’s leading arms company said that it was being outbid by Russia in negotiations with non-EU shell manufacturers. The company complained that the Kremlin was getting funding to buy shells together faster than the Europeans and that shells intended for Ukraine were being sold to Moscow instead as a result.
The West has been reluctant to allow Ukraine to use its weapons on targets on Russian soil, afraid of provoking Russia into a direct confrontation with the Nato allies. Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised that if Russia was hit by Nato weapons Russia would responds in kind and could target supplies for Ukraine based outside of Ukraine in what would be a dramatic escalation of the war.
The long-sought permission by Ukrainian leaders from Washington, will nearly double its striking distance to 300km by using the mid-range ATACMS missiles that it received from the US last October.
“We’ve already sent some, we will send more now that we have additional authority and money,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on May 30, as cited by AP. The additional ATACMS were included in a new military aid package signed by President Joe Biden on a day earlier.
Washington first included the ATACMS in a February military package and significantly up the number in another March $300mn interim package ahead of the large aid package decision in April.
Pushing Russian forces back hundreds of kilometres from the border will also neutralise Russia’s deadly glide bombs – heavy Soviet era gravity bombs that have been fitted with wings – that have an effective range of only around 100km but have been used to devastating effect on Ukraine’s defensive positions near the border. Russia has thousands of these glide bombs that carry up to 1,500kg payload and in addition to being very hard to shoot down, are so powerful Ukraine’s ground defences are largely ineffective against them.
The decision to allow Ukraine to hit targets on Russian soil and the delivery of ATACMS missiles was so secret that US lawmakers and others have been demanding the US send longer range missiles without knowing the decision had already been made and the missiles were already in Ukraine.
However, as with most of the Nato-supplied weapons, permission to use the ATACMS on Russia proper has come with strict limitations. Russia’s oil refineries have been hit with new Ukrainian long-range drones as part of a developing drone war this year, but its home made drones are not powerful enough to do more than superficial damage to Russian refineries but has reduced oil product production by some 14% this year.
The US has explicitly banned the use of the ATACMS missiles against targets further away inside Russia such as the oil refineries. As a further precaution, the US initially only sent Ukraine the mid-range version of the missile that is limited to 160km that puts only targets close to the Russo-Ukraine border into range, but not the refineries which are hundreds of kilometres or more from the frontline. However, the latest batch of missiles delivered have a longer range of some 300km as part of an ongoing creeping escalation.
Grady told AP this week that long-range weapons will help Ukraine take out Russian logistics hubs and troop concentrations behind enemy lines on the Russian side of the border. Grady didn’t give details of which missiles had been supplied, but said they will be “very disruptive if used properly, and I’m confident they will be.”
Ukraine has actually already used US-made missiles on targets that are inside Russia’s territory, but limited the strikes to the occupied Crimea peninsula, which the Kremlin sees has Russian sovereign territory, but no one else does. The Kremlin apparently has accepted Ukraine missiles strikes on the Crimea as legitimate targets and has not escalated its retaliation, as it is threatening to do now if Ukraine hits targets in the Russian mainland around the city of Belgorod in western Russian.
At a White House press briefing, US National Security Advisor of Jake Sullivan said the administration “has worked relentlessly to address [Ukraine’s] concerns” and stocks of missiles are now coming off the production line and the ATACMS can be sent to Ukraine without hurting US military readiness.
Russia outbidding Czechia in race to buy shells
The US permission to strike at Russian forces inside its own territory comes as Czechia says it is being outbid by Russia in a race to source crucial 155mm artillery shells from non-EU manufacturers, the Financial Times reported on May 30.
Czechia is spearheading a drive to buy $1bn worth of the crucial 155mm artillery shells that are the workhorse of Ukraine’s military campaign and of which supplies have run desperately low.
But Russia is outpacing Western countries in acquiring artillery supplies on the international market, the Czech government has warned. Delayed payments to arms companies could result in millions of rounds of ammunition being sent to Moscow instead of Kyiv, according to Prague officials.
One of the motivations for the US decision to allow Ukraine to use its long-range missiles on Russia is that Russia received some of its long-range weapons from North Korea recently and has used them on the battlefield in Ukraine. A US official told AP that this development had contributed to prompting the Biden administration to greenlight the new long-range missiles policy for Ukraine.
The Czech government is finding it difficult to compete with the better funded Russia, which has been above to offer to the shell manufacturers more rapidly than Europe.
'There are some countries that are supplying [Ukraine] from the same stockpiles that the Russians are [buying from],' Tomas Kopecny, Prague’s envoy for the reconstruction of Ukraine, told the FT. 'If you have the cash to do the pre-payment faster than the Russians, then the products go to the Ukrainian side. If you don’t have the cash on the account, then sometimes it goes to the Russians.'
The competition between the Brussels and Moscow is pushing up prices that is adding to difficulties caused by low quality of the non-EU munitions. Czechia’s largest ammunition supplier, Czechoslovak Group (CSG) says that, 'about 50% of the parts acquired by our company on behalf of the Czech government in places such as Africa and Asia were not good enough to be sent to Ukraine without further work,' according to Michal Strnad, owner and chair of CSG, cited by the FT.
'The production capacity is out there. But it is not in Europe,' Kopecny noted. He emphasized that the competition for ammunition with Russia involves 'single-digit millions of rounds,' requiring adequate financial resources to secure them.
Strnad points out that order books of European ammunition makers are full for the next eight years as there is no spare capacity to increase production in Europe. 'Even if Ukraine’s war ended now, there would be huge work in front of us to replenish the strategic stocks of Nato countries,' he said.
To address the shortfall, the Czech government has enlisted CSG and other smaller defence companies to source shells from non-EU countries. CSG is also in talks with Ukrainian authorities to build production facilities in Ukraine, which would include a factory for large-calibre shells, a truck assembly line, and a maintenance facility for weapons delivered to Kyiv.
'We would spend a few hundred million euros to launch these manufacturing projects in Ukraine and hope to reach an agreement with Kyiv this year,' Strnad said.
EU leaders from the Netherlands, Denmark, Latvia, and Poland, along with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, gathered in Prague to discuss Ukraine’s weapons shortfall. Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala announced that 15 EU and NATO countries had contributed €1.6 billion to the Czech initiative, which aims to deliver 1.5 million artillery shells to Ukraine. The first batch of tens of thousands of 155mm calibre shells is expected to be delivered next month.
Ukraine has been struggling to contain Russia largely due to a shortage of soldiers and ammunition. Shmyhal emphasized the need for fresh artillery ammunition and called on NATO allies to respond to Kyiv’s request for seven additional Patriot air defence systems and more fighter jets.
