Since the United States first shipped sophisticated weapons to Ukraine, President Biden has never wavered from one prohibition. It said President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had to agree never to fire weapons into Russian territory, which it argued violated Biden's commitment to “avoid World War III.” .
But the consensus on that policy is faltering: Pushed by the State Department, there is currently lively debate within the administration over relaxing the ban to allow Ukrainians to attack missile and artillery launch sites just over Russia's border, a goal that Zelenskiy argues enabled Russia's recent territorial gains.
The proposal, pushed by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken after a grueling trip to Kiev last week, is still in its formative stages, and it is unclear how many of Mr. Biden's aides have endorsed it. Officials say it has not yet been formally presented to the traditionally most cautious president.
State Department spokesman Matthew A. Miller declined to comment on internal deliberations over Ukraine policy, including Blinken's report after returning from Kiev.
But officials involved in the deliberations said Mr. Blinken's position changed as Russia opened a new front in the war, with devastating consequences. Moscow's forces quickly set up weapons across the border from northeastern Ukraine and turned them toward Kharkov. They knew that the Ukrainians could only use non-U.S. drones and other weapons to fight back.
Zelenskiy has been launching attacks on Russian ships, oil facilities and power plants for months, primarily using Ukrainian-made drones, which are not as powerful or fast as U.S. weapons. Not prepared. And thanks to improvements in electronic warfare technology, Russia is increasingly shooting down or accidentally flying Ukrainian drones and missiles.
There is now growing pressure on the United States to help Ukraine target Russian military installations, even as it wants to maintain a ban on attacking refineries and other Russian infrastructure with U.S.-supplied weapons. Britain, which typically aligns with the U.S. on warfighting strategy, has quietly lifted its own restrictions to allow its Storm Shadow cruise systems to be used to target Russia more broadly.
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, a former prime minister, visited Kiev before Blinken and said Ukraine “absolutely has the right to strike back at Russia.”
The United States is now considering training Ukrainian forces domestically rather than sending them to training grounds in Germany, which would require American military personnel to be stationed in Ukraine, something Biden has previously banned. This raises questions about how the U.S. would respond if the trainers, believed to be based near the western city of Lviv, come under attack. Russian forces are away from the main fighting zone but have regularly targeted Lviv.
Signs of a new change emerged in recent days. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III reiterated the administration's usual stance, saying, “Our expectation is that you will continue to use the weapons that we provide against targets inside Ukraine,” and seemed to suggest an exception might be made for Russia. The planes operate from the safety of Russian territory just across the border, allowing pilots to launch glide bombs into eastern Ukraine.
“The aerodynamics are a little bit different,” Austin allowed, but struggled to articulate the new standard, “so, again, I don't want to speculate about any involvement here on the podium, or any kind of involvement.”
When asked by a reporter whether such Russian aerial operations were “off limits or not,” Austin did not respond.
The Russians are accustomed to such arguments and have skillfully responded to U.S. concerns about an escalating war.
This week they began very public exercises with forces involving the use of tactical nuclear weapons of the kind used against Ukrainian forces, which Russian reports said was a “response to provocative rhetoric and threats made by Western officials against Russia.”
But the administration appears desensitized to such threats compared to earlier in the war and in October 2022, when there were fears that Russia, with its own military crippled, might use these weapons against military targets in Ukraine. During that incident, some administration officials overheard conversations between Russian officers who worried there was a 50 percent chance of a nuclear weapon being detonated.
In contrast, the current exercise is dismissed as bravado and a show of force.
In a notable departure from the administration's public stance, Victoria Nuland, who resigned as the No. 3 official at the State Department this spring, has now publicly said the administration needs to lift the ban on the use of weapons against people. claims. She is targeting Russia.
“If the attacks are coming directly across Russia's borders, then I think those bases should be targeted, whether they're missile launch sites or troop supply bases,” she said Sunday on ABC's “This Week.”
“I think the time has come because Russia is clearly escalating this war,” she added, noting that Russia's attack on Kharkov “is an effort to decimate it without putting boots on the ground. So I think it's time to give more support to the Ukrainians who are attacking these bases inside Russia.”
Nuland has always been in the more hardline camp of the administration, and her views were in the minority. But as time went on, she increasingly won the debate over whether to send more advanced missile and artillery systems to Ukraine, and with each concession Biden made, his worst fears about escalating tensions did not materialize.
In an interview with The New York Times this week, Mr. Zelenskiy dismissed concerns about escalation, saying Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has already escalated the war and thought it unlikely that Mr. Putin would follow through on his threat to launch nuclear weapons.
Mr. Biden and some of his aides are clearly unconvinced. They have said over the past year that they believe there is a red line that would provoke a harsher response from Mr. Putin. However, we don't know exactly where it is or what the reaction will be.
Zelenskiy spoke privately with Blinken last week and, in an interview with The Times, insisted it was important to have U.S. weapons used against Russian troops at this desperate stage of the war.
“This is part of our defense,” Zelenskyy told the Times. “How can we protect ourselves from these attacks? This is the only way.”