“Despite all my respect for every country and, of course, for our partners in Ireland – we need permission to use long-range weapons precisely from those countries that give us this long-range weapon, it depends on them,” Zelenskyy said.
He stressed that this does not depend on a coalition of all friendly partners – it depends on “very specific states”: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
“Today, only these four countries either provide or are capable of providing the long-range weapons that can help us push the Russian Federation out of our territory and save the lives of civilians,” the president said.
It’s somewhat analogous to the policy the US used with Finland around World War 2.
In the Winter War, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, attempted to annex it. The US provided financial support and some other aid to Finland. Then Germany attacked the Soviet Union and the US wound up on the same side of the war as the Soviet Union. They were both on the Allied side. However…the Soviet Union and the US didn’t agree on Finland.
Stalin demanded that the UK and US attack Finland. The UK did some rather limited pro forma airstrikes. The US told Stalin that he could shove right off with that.
As long as Finland was defending its own territory, the US was okay with it. But then Finland – who was conducting an offensive in conjunction with Germany – pushed back Soviet forces far enough that it could head outside its borders into the Soviet Union, and even more problematically started heading towards cutting supply lines linking supplies from the US to Soviet troops fighting against invading German forces.
That was a different story.
The US told Mannerheim that if Finland started cutting into the Soviet Union and severed those supply lines, that’d be it – it would enter the conflict against Finland. It’d support Finland defending Finnish territory, but not hauling off into Soviet territory.
Is a policy of limited support in Ukraine the right one? I don’t know. But I don’t think that limiting support, saying that one can fight forces that have invaded without restriction but can’t go clobber things in the other country with said weapons is intrinsically unreasonable. The “you can use weapons that cross the border to hit Russian forces that are taking advantage of that policy to attack you from safety in Russian territory” isn’t really a fundamental rewriting of that policy. It’s just refining it so that Russia can’t exploit the border to stage forces.
I don’t think that it is likely that the US will move on this policy. That is, the US has probably decided, after a lot of deliberation in the bureaucracy among experts, that it is not looking to have a war in Russia. As long as Russia is sending forces into Ukraine, then those are fair game. If Ukraine wants to cut into Russia with its resources, okay, the US doesn’t own those resources. If someone else wants to provide resources to do that, okay, that’s their resources.
I think that Ukraine has decided that – especially as Russia is attacking their power generation infrastruture – that conducting a strategic campaign against power generation infrastructure and fossil fuel infrastructure in Russia is fair game. Okay, that’s their call. But I don’t think that that’s something that the US is bound to back; the US can say “we don’t want to have a strategic bombing campaign against Russia’s infrastructure”. The flip side of “the US doesn’t tell Ukraine what to do” is “the US isn’t obligated to back every policy that Ukraine adopts”.
They are only asking to target places that are being used to actively attack them though. Airfields and the like. So I don’t personally see a difference between attacking across the border at troops vs aircraft.
Are they? Because I see Ukraine using drones against infrastructure and sending them against the City of Moscow itself. That isn’t wrong of them however it does lead to legitimate questions about where exactly they would strike with other weapons.
Yeah they’ve been very upfront about their targets. They want to attack places that are actively being used to attack them
Ukraine has drawn up a list of targets they would strike with the US weapons. And they have so far been using the US weapons only to strike targets allowed by the US. Even when it has been clearly against Ukrainian interests. I’d say that they can be trusted to only go after the targets they say. Ukraine cannot afford to lose western support.
I think what is preventing the US and allies from allowing strikes on deep Russian targets is the same as it ever was. The fear of escalation. And what they are trying to do is to slowly cook the frog. Small incremental increases in allowances.