In this image provided by the U.S. Army, soldiers, from the 3rd Battalion, 321st Field Artillery Regiment of the 18th Field Artillery Brigade out of Fort Bragg N.C., conduct live fire testing at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., on Dec. 14, 2021, of early versions of the Army Tactical Missile System.
John Hamilton
Ukraine has fired six ATACMS missiles into Russia, the Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday, marking the first possible attack using the U.S.-made longer-range weapons in 1,000 days of war.
Russia’s Defense Ministry said Ukrainian forces fired the Army Tactical Missile System into the Bryansk region. It said Russian air defense systems destroyed five of the missiles mid-flight and damaged a sixth, whose fragments started a small fire on the ground. No injuries were reported.
If confirmed, this barrage would appear to be the result of the Biden administration’s decision — which NPR and other news outlets have reported — to lift restrictions on Ukraine’s use of sophisticated long-range Western weaponry to target inside Russia.
Ukrainian officials have not confirmed the reports.
Russia says it has not received official notice of the White House decision to approve Ukraine’s use of long-range Western missiles to strike targets inside Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says, if the media reports are true that Ukraine now has U.S. approval to use Western weapons to strike deep inside Russia, the decision amounts to a “new spiral of tensions” with Washington.
Peskov also said Moscow’s position was well known, pointing to President Vladimir Putin’s comments in September. At the time, Putin argued that Ukraine’s military was incapable of deploying sophisticated long-range weapons without direct input from NATO specialists.
“This will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia,” concluded Putin.
Ukraine had lobbied Washington for many months to get permission to use the ATACMS.
The same day as the reports of Ukraine’s possible ATACMS strikes, Putin signed a decree updating Russia’s nuclear doctrine — in effect, expanding its options for carrying out a nuclear strike.
The new doctrine, which Putin announced in September, would consider a conventional-weapons attack by a nonnuclear state that’s supported by a nuclear-armed nation as a joint attack on Russia that could meet the conditions for a nuclear response.
That appeared to send a warning to Ukraine, the United States and other nuclear-armed backers.
Both the news of possible Ukrainian strikes and Russia’s updated nuclear doctrine come about two months before President-elect Donald Trump is to take the oath of office in Washington.
In his campaign for the presidency, Trump criticized the amount of U.S. aid for Ukraine and repeatedly suggested he would seek a swift negotiated end to the war in Ukraine with Moscow.
This is a developing story that will be updated.
