For the first time since President Joe Biden gave them permission to do so, Ukrainian soldiers have fired an American-supplied weapon at a target inside Russia. Will Russian President Vladimir Putin respond by escalating or widening the war? Probably not. If any officials fear he might, they aren’t saying so.
Yet until now, Biden had forbidden Ukraine from taking this step out of concern that doing so might cross a “red line,” pushing Putin to launch missiles against a NATO country’s territory or even to fire off a tactical nuclear weapon.
Why did Biden let go of his worries? Was he wise to do so? If he was, should he have dropped them long ago? Does Putin really have any “red lines,” or is he—has he always been—bluffing? Have Biden and other Western leaders been too cautious? Should they now drop all restrictions and let the Ukrainians fire away at will with everything they’ve got?
It should first be clarified that Biden’s order does not give Ukrainians carte blanche. It doesn’t allow them to fire Western-supplied weapons at any and all targets inside Russia. Rather, it lets them do so only at sites from which Russia has launched missiles into northeastern Ukraine, mainly in and around Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.
For some time now, Ukraine has been firing its own weapons, mainly drones, at targets inside Russia. Biden has denied any association with those strikes, neither condemning nor condoning them. However, few would dispute Ukraine’s right to return fire against missiles launched against its territory from inside Russia. So, what’s the distinction? Why has it been permissible (or at least not-impermissible) for Ukraine to hit Russia with its own weapons—but not to do so with weapons supplied by the U.S. or other NATO countries?
From the start of this war (at least from when the U.S. started to send Ukraine billions of dollars’ worth of weapons in response to Putin’s invasion in February 2024), Biden has drawn a very solid red line against sending American or NATO armed forces to fight the war directly. Doing so, he said several times, would mean the start of World War III—and, vital as it was to help Ukraine stave off Russian aggression, it wasn’t vital enough to risk a global conflict quite that cataclysmic.
From that moment of Biden’s commitment to aid Ukraine with caveats, Western leaders, advisers, and commentators debated, publicly and behind closed doors, just how large those caveats should be. Exactly where were Putin’s putative “red lines”? Inserting U.S. troops (boots on the ground or pilots in the air) would clearly cross those lines, would mark a declaration of war—but what other forms of intervention might also set Putin off? For a while, Biden and other Western leaders refused to send Ukraine the most modern tanks or advanced fighter planes or long-range missiles—concerned that Putin would see even these acts as NATO involvement in the war and respond accordingly. Gradually, these limits were relaxed or dropped—first came the tanks, then the planes (a few of them anyway), then the long-range missiles (at first with strict limits on how they could be used, then those limits were relaxed as well).
Whatever history’s verdict may turn out to be, Biden and the other Western leaders had reasons to impose those limits at the time. Putin was threatening to respond to these acts of escalation by launching tactical nuclear weapons. His army held exercises rehearsing their use. Maybe he was bluffing, but nobody could be sure. Launching nukes would be crazy and self-destructive, but who could tell whether that was enough to deter Putin? (Many, including me, doubted he would invade all of Ukraine, in part because it too seemed crazy and self-destructive.) That’s the thing about nuclear deterrence: It works both ways. (Russia is deterred from attacking us, but we’re also deterred from doing things that might seem like an attack on Russia’s vital interests.)
In any case, the strategic situation has now changed. When Biden and other leaders first put limits on what kinds of weapons to send Ukraine, or on how Ukraine should use them, the concern was that Putin might widen or escalate the war if it seemed that Ukraine was about to win. (There were times in the war’s first year, after Ukraine repelled the Russian invaders and pushed them back, when people thought this might be possible.)
Now, however, the concern is that without these more advanced weapons and more permissive rules about using them, Ukraine might lose. In other words, there are now competing risks—the risk that letting Ukraine fire NATO-supplied weapons into Russia might spur Russia to step up the violence versus the risk that not letting them fire the weapons might allow Russia to win, with all the resulting geopolitical calamities.
As has been widely reported, until the House of Representatives finally passed the spending bill for more military aid in April, Ukraine was running short of artillery shells, air-defense missiles, even basic ammunition. (I was recently told by a military adviser to NATO that at one point, for a couple of weeks, Ukraine’s army had no stockpiles in reserves; it had only the shells stored on the front lines.) Even now, as the bullets and shells are flowing in once again, Ukraine has very few weapons that have the range to reach—and thus neutralize—firing positions inside Russia.
At this moment, the first risk, the risk that motivated the restrictive policy until recently, is no longer compelling. One might imagine Putin launching missiles against Poland (as a transit point for NATO weapons into Ukraine) or firing off a few tactical nukes (to shock and awe the West into halting the war before it careened out of control) if he thought he was about to lose. But it’s hard to imagine him taking such extreme action if Russian troops were merely losing the slight, steady momentum they’d been gaining in the past few months and the war were settling back into a grinding stalemate. (This is the most that Biden’s new relaxed rules would allow Ukraine to accomplish—to hobble Russia’s offensive capabilities and buy some time.)
Finally, there is America’s 2024 presidential election to consider. If Donald Trump wins back the White House, Putin stands to rake home all the chips. Trump told Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (so Orbán subsequently said) that his plan to end the war quickly was to cut off all aid to Ukraine—in other words, to let Putin win. However, if Putin has meanwhile attacked a NATO country (spurring all the other NATO members to respond under the treaty’s Article 5, which says an attack on one is an attack on all) or fired off nuclear weapons (breaking the “nuclear taboo” in place since 1945), then even Trump might have a hard time letting that man in the Kremlin have his way.
There have been moments when a president’s allergy to escalation has been salutary—and other moments when it has been lamentable. In 1962, John F. Kennedy rejected the Joint Chiefs’ plan (which almost all of his advisers supported) to attack the Soviet missiles in Cuba and invade the island, in part because he thought the Soviets would respond by grabbing West Berlin. Instead, he negotiated a secret mutual withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba and U.S. missiles from Turkey. A good thing, since, as we later learned, some of those Soviet missiles were loaded with nuclear warheads and 40,000 Soviet troops were hidden on the island to stave off a possible U.S. invasion. JFK’s reticence may well have prevented WWIII.
By contrast, in 2014, Barack Obama rejected the urgings by his advisers (including Vice President Joe Biden) to send Ukraine anti-tank missiles after Putin annexed Crimea and made his first incursion into eastern Ukraine—because, as Obama put it in a National Security Council meeting, Ukraine mattered more to Russia than it did to us, so Russia would match anything we did militarily, plus some. It is possible that Putin thought he could get away with invading all of Ukraine in 2022 because he got away with invading a chunk of it in 2014. If some of Russia’s earlier invaders had been “sent home in body bags,” as Veep Biden and others said was necessary at the time, would Putin have later altered his risk-benefit calculus?
History seems clear in the rearview mirror. Sometimes, though, the events aren’t at all clear as they’re unfolding. It wasn’t clear at the time whether Kennedy was right in not attacking the Soviet missiles, or whether Obama was right in not sending anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. (The top advisers to both presidents thought at the time that they were wrong.)
Biden’s restrictions of the past two years may be seen as too much, or just right, with the passage of time. Right now, though, we’re living in a rare moment when the decision to relax those restrictions seems to be an unequivocally good idea: when the benefits of doing so are high and the risks of dangerous escalation—while not zero—are very low.