Article: NATO Summit Considers Ukraine’s Approval for Offensive Operations in Russia

Should Ukraine be allowed to use long-range weapons supplied by France, the United States and other NATO countries to strike enemy targets inside Russian territory?

That’s the question hanging over NATO talks this week, as both France and the U.S. have hinted that the longstanding policy prohibiting such attacks should be changed.

Ostensibly, NATO leaders are meeting this week to work out the details of a “package of support” prior to the July NATO summit in Washington, according to France 24, a publicly funded French news network.

Ukraine has been “pressing” allies for permission to attack targets inside Russia, France 24 reported, which has to some degree enjoyed protection of its forces by launching long-range attacks from inside its own country, making weapons off-limits to counter-attacks.

Both the U.S. and Germany have remained firm about not giving Ukraine such permission out of fear of being more deeply involved against Russia in the war, the outlet said.

Russia, however, already considers NATO to be engaged in the war, according to a Wednesday article from The New York Times.

“NATO is flirting with military rhetoric and falling into military ecstasy,” Dmitry Peskov, whom the Times described as “the Kremlin’s top spokesman,” told the paper.

“Asked if the Western alliance was nearing a direct confrontation with Russia, he said: ‘They are not getting close; they are in it,’” the Times reported.

That may be why some NATO countries have recently been hinting at an openness to allowing their weapons to be used against targets inside Russia for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine began.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has recently said “repeatedly” that NATO needed to reconsider the limits member states had put upon Ukraine’s ability to take the battle to Russian forces, France 24 noted.

The outlet wrote that French President Emmanuel Macron also said recently that Ukraine “should be allowed to ‘neutralise’ bases in Russia used to launch strikes.”

“If we tell (the Ukrainians) you do not have the right to reach the point from which the missiles are fired, we are in fact telling them that we are delivering weapons to you, but you cannot defend yourself,” Macron said late Tuesday during a state visit to Germany, according to The Associated Press.

And in a Wednesday piece, Politico reported that two “senior Biden administration officials” had hinted recently that American policy toward Kyiv’s use of NATO weapons might soon change.

One of those senior officials was Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told reporters that Biden’s Ukraine policy had always been “to adapt as the conditions have changed, as the battlefield has changed, as what Russia does has changed.”

“We’ve adapted and adjusted, too, and we’ll continue to do that,” he added, according to Politico.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby made a similar comment shortly thereafter, insisting that “no change” had yet been made to U.S. policy while also arguing that the administration’s “support to Ukraine has evolved appropriately.”

Seth G. Jones, a former U.S. military official who leads the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told the Times that Ukraine attacking targets inside Russia was similar to the U.S. and its allies attacking infrastructure inside Germany and Japan during World War II.

He also called concerns of Russian escalation of the conflict “overblown.”

“There has not been blowback against other NATO countries, such as the U.K., whose weapons Ukraine is using to strike targets in Russia,” Jones told the Times. “And Putin’s threats of escalations since the war began have been hollow.”