(CNN) – President Joe Biden is signaling a new openness to allowing Ukraine to fire Western-supplied missiles at targets inside Russia, and plans to discuss the matter with his new British counterpart, Keir Starmer, at the White House this Friday.
Before the meeting, U.S. officials said they did not expect Biden to immediately approve allowing the U.S. Army Tactical Missile Systems — known as ATACMS — to be launched against targets inside Russia far from the Ukrainian border.
But like the US, the UK has sent its own long-range Storm Shadow missiles to Kyiv. Its use, along with France’s use of similar weapons, is currently limited inside Ukraine, and any changes will require US approval, a topic to be discussed in talks this Friday.
The president has long resisted calls from Ukrainian officials to ease gun restrictions. But as the war drags on, and as the U.S. watches with growing concern as Iran supplies ballistic missiles to Russia, intense discussions have taken place in the White House about a possible change.
“We’re figuring that out right now,” Biden said when asked this week whether he would allow long-range missiles provided by the West to target military sites such as airfields, missile launchers, fuel tanks and ammunition depots inside Russia. The New York Times, citing European officials, reported that Biden appears poised to clear the way for Ukraine to use long-range missiles as long as it does not use U.S.-supplied weapons.
Within the Biden administration, the debate has pitted some officials who support easing restrictions against others who seem more skeptical, wary of both the risk of escalation and the usefulness of such a move.
Some assessments show that Russia has already moved its assets, particularly launch points for gliding bombs, currently the biggest threat to Ukrainian troops in the Kursk border region, out of range of long-range missiles.
And while U.S. officials have had ongoing discussions about Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles with their Ukrainian and British counterparts, U.S. officials said the topic was not intended to take up most of Biden’s Friday meeting. and Starmer, despite the great interest in the topic in recent days.
The two leaders were eager to discuss a number of issues as Starmer begins to settle into the job, a U.S. official said.
The National Security Council on Thursday declined to comment on whether Biden was preparing to greenlight the use of the UK’s Storm Shadow missiles on Russian territory.
For Starmer, who is prime minister as a result of his Labor Party’s landslide victory in the general election in early July, the meeting is an opportunity to further develop an important global relationship. He and Biden also met on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Washington over the summer.
That meeting took place a week after Starmer was elected prime minister and two weeks before Biden dropped out of the re-election race. Starmer, according to people familiar with the matter, requested another face-to-face meeting with Biden before he left office in an attempt to forge ties between the two nations, with questions about what the special relationship might look like after the US election. November.
No announcements are expected after the talks, people familiar with the matter said, and officials have said policy changes on U.S. weapons are not imminent.
Still, the fact that the conversation about long-range weapons is happening is an indication of how stagnant dynamics on the battlefield are causing Western leaders to reconsider their approach.
Russian President Vladimir Putin told reporters on Thursday that whether countries allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles to attack Russia poses a huge question whether NATO countries will become directly involved in the military conflict.
If Western nations decide to allow Ukraine to use its long-range weapons, Putin said: “This will mean that NATO countries, the United States and European countries, are at war with Russia.”
Top American and British diplomats traveled to Kyiv this week and heard new pleas from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to allow his military to fire long-range weapons at Russian military sites.
U.S. officials argue that they constantly reevaluate their approach based on battlefield conditions. Although the US has changed its policy to allow limited cross-border attacks on Russia using US-supplied weapons, the administration has not yet allowed broader attacks.
Asked about escalation concerns, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that they are a factor, but “certainly not the only factor, and it’s not necessarily a deal breaker.”
“From day one, as you have heard me say, we have adjusted and adapted as the needs have changed, as the battlefield has changed, and I have no doubt that we will continue to do that as this evolves.” Blinken said at a news conference in Kyiv with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy.
The revelation that Iran has been providing ballistic missiles to Russia has changed the debate about Ukraine’s capabilities, Lammy said.
Other senior US officials have sounded more skeptical. Last week, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin rejected the notion that lifting restrictions and striking deeper into Russia is a silver bullet, saying “there is no one capability that, by itself, will be decisive in this campaign.” .
“There are a lot of targets in Russia, a big country, obviously,” Austin said at a Ukrainian Defense Contact Group meeting in Germany on Friday. “And there is a lot of capability that Ukraine has in terms of (unmanned aerial vehicles) and other things to address those objectives.”
A U.S. official said the administration views Ukraine’s long-range strikes in Crimea and Russia’s naval fleet there as a much more effective use of ATACMS, and a strategy that has been yielding significant results in recent months.
The Defense Department has a limited stock of the long-range systems, the official said, so the U.S. has been trying to persuade Ukraine to use them to maximum possible effect rather than on scattered targets in Russia. which the US considers of little strategic value.
A separate U.S. official said they expect Russia to continue moving assets out of range of long-range systems, noting that “several hundred” ATACMS have been transferred to Ukraine “and Ukraine has used most of them.”
Despite those reservations, a growing chorus of voices in Washington is calling for restrictions to be lifted. Top Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including its chairman, Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, have said restrictions should be eased to give Ukraine a better chance of success.
“In light of Putin’s increasingly horrific attacks on civilian targets, it is time to lift restrictions on the use of long-range weapons provided by the US to allow Ukraine to hit high-value Russian military targets,” Shaheen said.
Earlier in the week, the bipartisan Congressional caucus on Ukraine called on Biden to allow Ukraine to strike targets inside Russia with long-range weapons.
“Unless these restrictions are lifted, Ukraine will continue to fight for victory in its fight to defend its sovereignty and its people. “The Ukrainian people will continue to suffer unnecessary death, loss, and hardship as Russia capitalizes on this policy and escalates its bombing raids across Ukraine,” the bipartisan lawmakers wrote.
A group of key House Republicans also urged Biden to ease restrictions in a letter on Monday. And in a separate open letter, 17 former national security officials, including former US ambassadors to Ukraine and top military commanders, called on Blinken and Lammy to “act quickly.”
“A policy change cannot come soon enough,” they wrote.
