On November 17, the United States told the world what they told Ukraine three days earlier: Ukriane had permission to fire American supplied long-range missiles deeper into Russian territory.
Not much needs to be said about the risks involved in the decision. They are the same risks that have caused the Joe Biden administration to hesitate green lighting the strikes for months. Russian President Vladimir Putin clearly said in September that because long-range strikes into Russia “are impossible to employ without intelligence data from…NATO satellites,” that “mean[s] that NATO countries…are at war with Russia.” And that, Putin says, “will clearly change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict.”
The calculation whether or not to take a risk can only be made by weighing it against the benefits. But the benefits of green lighting the long-range strikes are illusory.
The Biden administration has not given Ukraine carte blanche to launch missiles into Russia. The license comes with boundaries; the missiles can only be fired into the Kursk region of Russia that Ukrainian troops invaded in August.
The United States has given two reasons for their permission to use their missiles to strike the Kursk region. The Biden administration seems to have been tipped in favor of allowing the strikes by the introduction of North Korean troops into Kursk. The hoped for benefit would be deterring North Korea from sending more troops.
The presence of 10,000 elite North Korean troops who are currently in combat in Kursk has not been proven. And deterring their arrival cannot come close to balancing the risk of direct U.S. involvement in firing missiles into Russia. North Korean troops, even if present, do not alter the balance on the battlefield. The Russian armed forces are growing by 30,000 volunteers a month. 10,000 North Koreans represents only about ten days worth of soldiers. Russia is neither desperate for troops in the Donbas, where they are rapidly advancing, nor in Kursk, where U.S. officials say they have amassed a force of tens of thousands of soldiers without having to pull a single soldier out of Ukraine.
The second hoped for benefit is helping the Ukrainian armed forces hold onto Kursk until the arrival of the inevitable negotiations, at which time Kursk can be bartered for Ukrainian territory held by Russia.
That benefit is as illusory as the first. Ukraine seems to be throwing everything into holding onto the territory it has seized in Kursk. There are reports that Kiev has made the hard to understand decision to prioritize holding onto Kursk over defending its own territory in Donbas. According to these reports, the best military equipment and the best troops are being sent into Kursk to hold onto land instead of into Donbas to reinforce the crumbling front lines. Now, the risk is being taken to throw in the long-range missiles.
Russia, though, is not likely to negotiate until they reclaim Kursk, which they likely eventually will, even faced with long-range missiles. And even if Russia failed to reclaim Kursk, it is not at all clear that Putin would trade that frontier land for the large ethnic Russian Donbas territory.
In the face of the unrealistic benefits, one other possible motive remains. Granting Ukraine permission to fire U.S.-supplied missiles into Kursk is the trump card in the Biden administration’s policy of “Trump-proofing” the war in Ukraine. Freeing Ukraine to escalate and provoking Russia to respond creates a terrain that is much more difficult for Donald Trump to keep his campaign promise of ending the war in Ukraine. As Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, suggested to me, the legacy of Biden as the “fearless defender of Ukraine” also makes it easier for Democrats to “attack Trump for ‘surrender’ over a future peace deal.”
But “Trump-proofing” the war can only serve to prolong the fighting, pile on the dead, and contribute to a greater loss of Ukrainian territory. The likely ending, even if Ukraine holds Kursk for a while, is a negotiated settlement that looks much like the one on the table in the first weeks of the war, but with the additional costs the past three years has brought to Ukraine.
Ironically, “Trump-proofing” can also have an opposite, unintended effect. The policy, and the long-range missile decision, were meant to make it harder for Trump to end the war. Putin knows that too. The New York Times reports that Russian commentators are already framing it that way. Seeing the long-range missile decision in that light gives Putin a motive for patience. He can resist the provocation, not retaliate in a way that escalates the war, and wait for Trump.
The hoped for benefits do not justify the real potential of the risk. And there are longer term risks too.
Geoffrey Roberts, professor emeritus of history at University College Cork and a specialist in Soviet military policy, told me that he “doubts the decision will make much difference militarily.” He called it “another publicity stunt by the Ukrainian-Western side.” He said that he “expects Russia will act with restraint and continue to focus on winning on the battlefield ahead of a ceasefire and peace negotiations when Trump takes power.”
Not only will long-range missiles not significantly change the larger battlefield, Alexander Hill, professor of military history at the University of Calgary, told me that “this decision is unlikely to have a dramatic impact [even] on the fighting at the frontline in the Kursk region.” Though there may be some initial tactical successes, he says that the Russian armed forces will quickly make “the sorts of restrictions on troop and supply concentrations that they did in the Donbass that have minimized the consequences of ATACMS” and other Western missile systems for Russia.
On Monday, November 19, Ukraine fired American-made ATACMS long-range missiles into Russia for the first time. Ukrainian officials say the missiles struck an ammunition depot in the Bryansk region of southwest Russia, which borders on, but is not in, Kursk. The Russian Ministry of Defense, though, says that, of the six ATACMS that were fired, five were shot down and the other was damaged. They say that falling fragments from the damaged missile caused a fire at the munition depot but no damage or casualties.
The long-range missile decision won’t significantly impact troop numbers, North Korean or otherwise, and it won’t enhance the Kursk card in negotiations. But the decision “escalates tensions to a qualitatively new level,” as Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said. And it continues to poison trust and relations between Russia and the West. The escalation in arming Ukraine against Russia could even contribute to a belief in Moscow, Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, told me, that “Ukraine has to be destroyed to remove a permanent threat to the Russian Federation’s security.”
Though Putin could demonstrate patience and wait out the sunset of the Biden administration and the start of the Trump administration, the crossing of a Russian redline could also lead to further escalation. Hill told me that Russia could “supply allies such as Iran and North Korea with capabilities that they currently do not possess: that is, after all, what the U.S. and its allies did for Ukraine.” They could intensify attacks on military sites or energy infrastructure in Ukraine. They could strike distribution hubs in Poland or Romania through which ballistic missiles and other weapons transit on their way to Ukraine (something Russia has refrained from doing). They could even, Ian Proud, former British diplomat at the British Embassy in Moscow, suggests, “make a limited and pre-signaled strike on a US military facility in Europe or elsewhere.”
Almost simultaneously with the first ATACMS missile strike, Putin signed a revised nuclear doctrine that had been formulated in September. The revised doctrine specifies that a conventional attack on Russia by a country that is supported by a nuclear power will be treated as a joint attack on Russia. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, reminded the West on the sidelines of the G20 meeting that, “If the long-range missiles are used from the territory of Ukraine against the Russian territory, it will mean that they are controlled by American military experts and we will view that as a qualitatively new phase of the Western war against Russia and respond accordingly.” He also, however, said, “Russia is strictly committed to a position of avoiding nuclear war, and that the weapons act as a deterrent.”
Each of these risks outweighs the dubious hoped for benefits of direct U.S. participation in missile strikes deep into Russia. Instead of holding onto Kursk with its unlikely prospect of improving negotiations, the United States should be pushing for negotiations now. Instead of Trump-proofing and prolonging the war, the Biden administration should be facilitating a transition to diplomacy. Sooner, as Trump promises, or later, as Biden is supporting, the war in Ukraine will end at the negotiating table. And the result will likely be the same, minus all the deaths that are yet to come.
