Biden’s missiles will do Ukraine no favours

With just over 60 days left in office, Joe Biden’s White House has significantly escalated the Ukraine war it had tried so hard to contain by authorising the use of US-supplied medium-range ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems) and antipersonnel mines against targets inside Russia. Biden’s U-turn breaks a long-standing convention on US presidential transitions that lame-duck presidents aren’t supposed to make major foreign policy changes – especially not ones that severely constrain the stated policies of their elected successor. The immediate result has been a direct Russian threat to the US embassy in Kyiv and what German defence minister Boris Pistorius has called ‘sabotage’ of undersea internet cables in the Baltic. The White House’s announcement, rather than helping Ukraine,  has instead made Donald Trump’s vow to end the war more difficult.

International support for continuing to arm Ukraine is collapsing, while diplomatic efforts are gathering pace. Even Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged last week that the war is likely to end soon, through negotiation, and that Trump’s election will hasten that outcome. He said: ‘From our side, we must do everything so that this war ends next year, through diplomatic means.’

Authorising the use of ATACMS against Russia was one of the very few diplomatic cards that Trump had left to play against Putin. Yet instead of allowing Trump to use that threat as part of a negotiation strategy, Biden has instead just thrown it into the general maw of a failing Ukrainian war effort.

Operationally, Ukraine has once again found itself in the worst of all possible worlds. Militarily, the best use to which Ukraine could put ATACMS would be to systematically destroy all Russian oil and gas infrastructure within their 185-mile range – including pipelines leading to the strategic oil port of Novorossiysk.