Ukraine Targets Russia With Secret New Supply of U.S. Weapons

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed on Tuesday that Ukraine used long-sought U.S. long-range missiles in a strike on Russian airfields overnight, in an attack believed to be one of the deadliest in the history of the Russian air force, reportedly killing dozens of soldiers and destroying nine helicopters. 

Ukraine has been asking for longer-range weapons almost since the war began in February 2022. First, U.S. HIMARS artillery changed the tactical battlefield with ranged fire. Now, it seems, Ukraine has something new in its quiver to make Russia quake.

U.S. President Joe Biden told Zelensky in September that Washington would provide a limited number of U.S. Army Tactical Missile Systems, a long-range piece of firepower, to Ukraine. Kyiv had long asked for the missiles, known in U.S. Defense Department parlance as ATACMS, to do damage to Russian forces and carried out strikes overnight that targeted forces in the occupied cities of Berdyansk and Luhansk, deep behind Russian lines.

“Our agreements with President Biden are being implemented,” Zelensky said in a video message on Tuesday. “They are being implemented very accurately—the ATACMS have proven themselves.”

The White House had been under pressure from Ukraine, European governments, and the U.S. Congress to send ATACMS, the longest-range variant that can hit enemies as far as 200 miles away. ATACMS were preceded to the battlefield by the British delivery of air-launched Storm Shadow missiles and their French equivalent. But unlike the previous rounds of U.S. assistance that have been announced publicly, the United States delivered the missiles in secret, hoping to avoid provoking Russia. U.S. military officials have still downplayed the decision as business as usual. 

“It would be another arrow in the quiver,” a senior U.S. military official said during the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany last month. “There are no silver bullets. So provision of one system versus another, it doesn’t solve things. It doesn’t equate to instantaneous victory.”

But it would be hard to tell that to Ukrainian officials and commentators doing victory laps on social media on Tuesday,  the Wall Street Journal was the first to report that ATACMS had been used in the strikes on the Russian-occupied territories. 

It was not immediately clear how far the new weapons would help Ukraine extend its reach. Images on social media of apparent explosions at the Russian air base indicated that the United States had sent a variant of the weapon that would unleash cluster munitions, suggesting it was not the 200-mile-ranged round. 

Still, with Ukrainian troops battling through three layers of densely packed Russian defenses ringing the 600-mile front and grappling with large minefields, long-range fire is welcome. It’s not just the front line but Russia’s sacred sanctuary in Crimea that is now in the crosshairs.

“We just saw how the Ukrainians are going to do it,” said Ben Hodges, a retired three-star general and former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. “You don’t have to sit on top of the land bridge to cut it. If you can use long-range fire to make it difficult for the Russians to move, then you’re well on your way to severing the land bridge and isolating all of Crimea.”

Hodges also said the strike on an unprotected Russian position was a sign that Moscow hadn’t learned to disperse its troops even after repeated Ukrainian strikes on the Russian Black Sea Fleet and its headquarters and after Ukraine had taken out top Russian officers in the more than 19 months since the full-scale invasion began. 

“How in the hell could they have that many helicopters sitting out in the open unprotected when they should have known that Ukraine had received this capability?” Hodges said. 

The move comes after months of internal debate within the Biden administration about sending the weapons, with officials giving public excuses that the United States didn’t have enough ATACMS or that sending them would increase the risk of Russia escalating the war, either with tactical nuclear weapons or onto NATO soil. 

The debate has gone on long enough that now there are serious questions bubbling up on Capitol Hill about how long the Biden administration and Kyiv’s allies can fight through political headwinds to deliver aid to Ukraine. Just weeks after Zelensky’s visit to Washington in September, a far-right coalition in Congress ousted Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and no candidate has come up with enough votes since then to fill the job that’s third in the line of succession to the U.S. presidency.

Royal Netherlands Navy Adm. Rob Bauer, NATO’s senior military official, has talked openly about the woes of the alliance in producing enough ammunition and artillery rounds to feed Ukraine’s voracious appetite and restock U.S. and Western arsenals. More than a century ago, the situation was similar but on the Western Front. Bauer said in an interview last week that a recent meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels had steeled members about the urgency of continuing to support Kyiv. 

“The messaging is not to say, ‘It’s over. We cannot support Ukraine anymore. We cannot become stronger in terms of collective defense,’” Bauer said. “It is to motivate, to make sure everybody understands the sense of urgency of where we are.”