On ATACMS, Deep Strikes and Policy Pivots
President Biden has allowed Ukraine to hit inside Russia with American missiles. Why now?
Overnight Ukraine fired as many as six U.S.-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) at a Russian ammunition depot in Bryansk, a Russian region that borders Belarus and Ukraine. According to Andrii Kovalenko, a member of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, the target consisted of “artillery ammunition, including North Korean ammunition for their systems.”
This comes a day after widespread reporting that President Biden, in a valedictory act of security assistance, had finally authorized Kyiv to conduct deep strikes into Russia using American-made munitions, albeit with restrictions. Specifically, the New York Times stated that ATACMS, which have a maximum range of about 186 miles, could only be used “in defense of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region” in southeastern Russia where Ukraine has occupied a swath of territory since its surprise cross-border offensive in August. Kursk is also where the first of an estimated 10,000 North Korean soldiers have turned up to bolster Russia’s efforts to expel the Ukrainians. Bryansk could well be considered part of that campaign, given the hermit kingdom’s kit stockpiled there, which includes 152 millimeter and 122 millimeter artillery shells. That this opening salvo of ATACMS lies a good 150 miles north of Kursk is revealing.
Last night, a senior U.S. official hinted to me that the alleged geographic restrictions on deep strikes were not quite what the media had made them out to be. For one thing, it’d be strange to allow long-sought capability in pursuit of a Ukrainian invasion of Russia rather than to help Ukraine defend against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over the past three months, Moscow has steadily gained ground in Donbas, particularly in the Pokrovsk direction, albeit at enormous costs in manpower and materiel. (The Ukrainian General Staff claimed that on November 11, Russia lost a record-breaking 1,950 soldiers, a figure that cannot be independently verified but tracks as only slightly higher than the recent daily averages cited by Western governments.)
Given the Biden administration’s well-documented preference for escalation management in a war that has now reached its thousandth day, escalating exclusively in pursuit of a sideshow military operation being waged inside Russia, and only because of Pyongyang’s entry into the fray, seemed a bit Mad Hatter-y in its illogic.
As it turns out, the debate about deep strikes has been ongoing for quite a while, before the North Korean deployments, and only looked dead during the election-dominated news cycle.
Several weeks ago, a different U.S. official told me that debate was still very much alive within a small but forceful cohort in the administration. The highest-profile figure was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has long persuaded Biden to do for Ukraine what others in the White House don’t want him to do. Unfortunately, the outcome of that debate was contingent on the results of the U.S. presidential contest. Biden did not want to do anything too provocative before Nov. 5, lest he give a new talking point to the Trump campaign, which ran on bringing about a swift but unspecific diplomatic resolution to the war, and intimated that anything short of that outcome would lead to World War III. The Biden White House itself has resorted to similar apocalyptic language when advocating against a policy of escalation, most recently the one it just abandoned. Had Kamala Harris won, we might well have seen the same decision made now as part of a Democratic foreign policy hand-off. But that Trump won actually helped Biden get to “yes” in a different way.
Putin, as per the new thinking, is unlikely to retaliate before a second Trump term begins, because doing so might force Trump to counter that retaliation on Day One when he’s much more inclined to cut a deal. Russia risks forfeiting a lot more gained through negotiations with an incoming administration rife with personalities warm to the Kremlin position (to put it mildly) than it would through a major kinetic action, least of all using a nuclear weapon. Lifting the ATACMS restriction might also weaken the Russian negotiating position in two months’ time, especially if Ukraine is able to hold more of Kursk as a future bargaining chip or even push back Russian advances in Donetsk.
A more legitimate fear was “horizontal escalation,” an uptick in GRU-led sabotage operations against Western military industrial sites and critical infrastructure. Yet, as I argued earlier, it is hard to see where Russia needs any encouragement in this respect: these operations are more numerous than what has come to light and encompass arsons, cargo plane terrorism, agitprop, even assassination plots. They’ve taken place across EU and NATO territory without ATACMS being unleashed on sovereign Russia.
Within the last 48 hours, in fact, two underwater fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea were mysteriously severed, according to Reuters, one connecting Helsinki to the German port city of Rostock, the other connecting Lithuania to the Swedish island of Gotland. A joint statement issued by Finland and Germany alluded to the threat of “hybrid warfare by malicious actors.” Wonder whom. Maybe the dual cable cutting was done by another Chinese ship (a year ago, one damaged the Balticconnector gas pipeline in the same body of water). But Finland and Sweden are conspicuously the two newbies in NATO and both are outsize suppliers of weapons and equipment to Ukraine; their importance as such will only grow in the event the U.S. stops arming Kyiv after Trump is inaugurated. Moreover, as energy security expert Benjamin Schmitt pointed out in an email, the Finnish-German cable, C-LION1, is owned by the Finnish telecom company Cinia Oy, which is “among the three firms leading the development of the Far North Fiber project, a proposed subsea telecommunications cable that would connect Northern Europe directly with Asia via the Canadian Arctic, bypassing the Russian Federation and the Russian Arctic.”
Other obstacles to the deep strike authorization were the rather risible claims being leaked to the press by naysayers in the Pentagon and National Security Council that hitting Russian military targets in Russia would have no tangible military benefits. (This of course only undermined the case that Putin would finally discover his elusive “red line” over a negligible shift in security assistance, but never mind.) A straw man argument was that most of the airbases from which Russian bombers take off before pulverizing Ukrainian cities were out of range of ATACMS. As the Institute for the Study of War assessed in August, “[a]t least 209 of 245 (over 85%) known Russian military objects in range of ATACMS are not air bases.”
Here the Ukrainians led by example.
In late September, they used their homegrown fleet of drones to strike at two ammunition depots within Russia — one in Toropets in the northwest, the other in Tikhoretsk in the southwest. The Toropets bombing was especially noteworthy.
Colonel Ants Kiviselg, the head of Estonia’s military intelligence service, told Estonia’s public broadcaster ERR at the time: “30,000 tons of explosive ordnance were detonated, which means 750,000 shells. If we take the average battle rate, the Russian Federation has fired 10,000 rounds a week. So that’s two to three months’ supply of ammunition. As a result of this attack, Russia has suffered losses in ammunition and we will see the impact of these losses on the front in the coming weeks.” As if to bolster this forecast, just yesterday, Deputy Commander of Missile Forces and Artillery of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Serhiy Musienko told Ukrainian outlet RBK that the current ratio of artillery use is 1:2 in Russia’s favor; a marked improvement over other dire points in the war when it was 1:6 or 1:7 in Russia’s favor.
The Toropets strike and its immediate toll on Russian stockpiles, I’m given to understand, did not go unnoticed in the U.S. government and furthered the brief that Blinken and company have been pushing for months. Did it matter to the Kremlin that entirely expendable mobiks in Donbas lost three months of ammo because the weapons responsible were made in Ukraine rather than made in the U.S.A? Will it matter that Ukrainian drones that inevitably pound into Russian warehouses in future are going to be manufactured at scale by $800 million of U.S. taxpayer money?
Last night’s target in Bryansk, the 67th Arsenal of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense, is one the Ukrainians hit twice before with their own drones — first in August 2023, and then again in October — but never to such devastating effect as they did last night using ballistic missiles. The very missiles we were all told only a month ago were of no real use to them in the broader war effort.
Well, which is it, then? An anticlimactic policy pivot, an overdue freeing of Ukraine’s hand, or have we just ticked an hour closer to midnight because a bunch of battle-untested North Koreans are about to die a little faster thanks to Lockheed Martin? I guess we’ll soon find out.