As US President Joe Biden departed Washington DC on 17 November, bound for Lima, Peru, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in his final round of international summits, he quietly authorised Ukraine to begin striking targets inside Russia with American long-range missiles. For his critics, the belated decision was emblematic of his exasperating approach to the war more broadly. In public, he has delivered defiant speeches and vowed to stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes”. But in practice his approach has often been maddeningly incremental, offering just enough support to prevent Ukraine’s defeat and no more, following months of handwringing and with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly pleading his case. Yet Biden’s supporters – and the president himself – argue that he is trying to balance the imperative to defend Ukraine with the need to “avoid World War III”, noting that Vladimir Putin controls the world’s largest confirmed nuclear arsenal and that he has frequently threatened to use it if the West intervenes too forcefully on Kyiv’s behalf. Now, with just weeks left in office, Biden is calling Putin’s bluff.
That Biden has decided to allow Ukraine to use US-supplied long-range missiles to hit targets within Russia after months of restricting their use reflects his assessment that the war has entered a dangerous new phase. US officials briefing reporters behind the scenes in recent days – there has been no formal announcement of the change in policy – point to the recent arrival of an estimated 12,000 North Korean troops to fight alongside Russia as evidence that the conflict is already escalating, and drawing in more of the world. There is a tactical component to this decision too. Washington had previously argued the American-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) would have minimal utility given the risks involved, because Moscow had already moved its most valuable assets beyond the missiles’ 300-kilometre (190-mile) range, staging attacks on Ukraine from bases in central and northern Russia. But with around 50,000 Russian and North Korean soldiers now massing in the Kursk region of south-west Russia ahead of an expected counterattack to take back territory Ukraine has held since August, the Biden administration believes the ATACMS could be useful in targeting troops and weapons systems. (It is unclear if the US has given Ukraine permission to strike targets deeper into Russia.) In the process, the West would send a message to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, about the fate that awaits his forces if he sends another contingent to support his new ally, Putin. Although this assumes Kim, who controls one of the world’s largest standing armies with an estimated 1.3 million men under arms, is likely to be concerned by the loss of his countrymen.
Biden is also all too aware that Donald Trump will return to power in January determined to bring the conflict to an end, if not in the 24 hours he has promised then as rapidly as possible. If Ukraine is to be forced into negotiations with Russia at the new president’s behest in the coming months, it must do so from a position of relative strength rather than impending defeat. Biden’s decision clears the way for the UK and France to follow suit in lifting their own restrictions on the use of long-range missiles, such as the British Storm Shadow, by Ukraine. (As the NS went to press, no decision had been announced, but the UK was expected to do so imminently.) Zelensky, who has been lobbying for this decision for much of the year, said on 17 November that the first strikes would soon follow, vowing: “The rockets will speak for themselves.” Two days later, Ukraine fired several long-range missiles into Russia’s Bryansk region, which is about 250km north of Kursk.
The crucial question now is how Putin will respond. The Russian president has warned explicitly in recent months that if the US and its Nato allies allowed their missiles to be used to strike his territory, it would mean they were “at war with Russia”. On the eve of Keir Starmer’s meeting with Biden at the White House in September, when they were expected to discuss lifting the restrictions, the Russian leader issued an unusually specific threat. “If this decision is made, it will mean nothing short of direct involvement – it will mean that Nato countries, the United States and European countries are parties to the war in Ukraine,” he warned in St Petersburg on 12 September. “And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”
Two weeks later Putin announced that Russia was changing its nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold for nuclear use. Where previously the use of nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack was limited to situations “when the very existence of the state is in jeopardy” now they could be used in the event of a “critical threat to our sovereignty,” Putin explained during a security council meeting on 25 September. The new conditions were more subjective and deliberately ambiguous, making it harder for outside powers to determine what, precisely, might provoke a nuclear response. The formal text has not been released, but Putin stressed that nuclear weapons could also be used in response to a large-scale “aerospace attack” which involved the use of “aircraft, missiles, and drones” – the very weapons Ukraine now has to hand.
“The reason for changing the nuclear doctrine was the threat of a full escalation by the West,” Sergei Markov, a former adviser to Putin, wrote on his official blog in response. “The West is sure that Russia will not use tactical nuclear weapons first. Russia is now saying it is ready to do so.” He suggested Russia could use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, or target military facilities in Nato countries if they were used to support Ukrainian strikes, which could, in turn, draw the entire alliance into war with Moscow. On 19 November, two days after Biden authorised the use of US long-range missiles by Ukraine, and with the first reports of a strike on Russian territory, Putin signed the updated doctrine into law. His spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that the changes were intended to ensure that “a potential adversary understands the inevitability of retaliation in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation or its allies”.
The problem with determining how seriously to take these threats is that Putin has repeatedly rattled his nuclear sabre and laid down supposed red lines from the very first hours of this war. In his Kremlin address on 24 February 2022, for instance, he warned that “anyone who would consider interfering from the outside” would face “consequences greater than any you have faced in history”. During the years since, Russian officials have invoked nuclear weapons in the context of the war more than 200 times, according to research by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a DC-based think tank. Russia has placed its strategic forces on heightened alert, simulated a nuclear exchange and conducted military exercises involving tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Putin’s nuclear signalling is not subtle. And yet each time, as the US and its allies have tiptoed up to Putin’s red lines – cautiously sending Ukraine the first short-range missiles and rockets for use inside the country, and then tanks, and then fighter jets – the response has been the same. The Russian president pummels Ukraine but holds off on overt action to punish its Western partners, only to draw another red line and insist that, this time, he is serious.
This does not mean Putin’s warnings can be airily dismissed. He has made clear, on multiple occasions, that he believes Russia is already fighting an existential war with the wider West. He is already fighting what Kaja Kallas, the EU’s new foreign policy chief, has called a “shadow war” in Europe, with a campaign of sabotage and arson attacks across the continent, including in the UK, where Russian intelligence agents are suspected of instigating a fire at a DHL warehouse in Birmingham in July. That same month, US intelligence foiled an alleged Russian plot to kill the head of the German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall. Putin has a range of options at his disposal which may not be immediately obvious to outside observers, such as stepping up these efforts to destabilise Europe or supplying powerful weaponry and advanced technology to US adversaries, such as the Houthis in Yemen, who have already disrupted crucial shipping routes.
Putin will almost certainly retaliate, but he will weigh his decision carefully, mindful of the imminent return of Trump to the White House. The Russian president is wary of drawing the US back into a conflict the new administration seems intent on leaving, and which he believes he is winning. Russian forces are grinding forward in Donetsk, wearing down the overstretched Ukrainian lines as they close in around the rail hub of Pokrovsk. Russia has also stepped up its bombardment of Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure with missiles and glide bombs, causing blackouts in multiple regions as another bitter winter sets in. Putin may well assess he has no need to offer meaningful concessions in any coming peace negotiations and can stick to his maximalist demands. As he told the German chancellor Olaf Scholz in a call on 15 November – the first time the two leaders have spoken since the start of the war – Russia demands that Ukraine will not join Nato, remain nuclear-free and submit to “demilitarisation” and “denazification”. He also insisted Russia be allowed to keep the five regions of Ukraine he claims to have annexed – Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – even though only the first two of those regions are currently under Russian control. That Scholz called Putin at all will have been interpreted by the Russian leader as an encouraging sign European unity is fracturing, and an end to his isolation is in sight.
Better yet, Putin may now believe the resurgence of Trump offers him more than just the opportunity to end the war in Ukraine on his terms. The incoming president has made no secret of his admiration for autocrats like Putin and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, nor his distaste for American alliances. Trump mulled whether to leave Nato on several occasions during his last term, according to those who served under him. He also threatened to pull US troops out of Germany and South Korea during disputes over cost-sharing. More importantly, from Putin’s perspective, Trump has vowed to take a wrecking ball to the old liberal international order, that Russia (and China) have long hoped to see overturned. In Trump, his famed unpredictability notwithstanding, Putin might well judge he has finally found an American president who shares his belief that the world should, once again, be divided into spheres of influence, with Russia granted the status of an unquestionable great power and able to renegotiate Europe’s security architecture. Perhaps he can already imagine the prospect of sitting down with Trump, Xi, and, say, Emmanuel Macron representing Europe, to carve up the globe in a Yalta 2.0. (The idea might appeal to Trump, too.)
At the start of Biden’s presidency in 2021, he toured the globe assuring US allies that Trump had been an aberration, repeating mantra-like: “America is back.” Now we know it was his presidency, his vision of liberal Atlanticism, that was the aberration. This time, there may be no coming back. Europe and Ukraine must brace for a future in which American support can no longer be assured, and a new world order whose contours may well be determined by the burgeoning relationship between Putin and Trump.
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