Volodymyr Zelensky could not be clearer about what he wants from the US and the UK. At every available opportunity in recent weeks, the Ukrainian president has pleaded with his Western allies to lift their restrictions on the use of long-range weapons to strike targets deep inside Russia.
“We think it is wrong,” he said of the rules governing the use of Western-supplied missile systems at a meeting of Ukraine’s backers at a US military base in Germany on 6 September. “We need to have this long-range capability.” Ahead of his meeting with the British foreign secretary David Lammy and US secretary of state Antony Blinken in Kyiv on Wednesday (11 September), Zelensky said he hoped for “some strong decisions on this”.
Lammy and Blinken arrived in the Ukrainian capital on board a private overnight train from Poland. Air raid sirens punctuated their day-long visit, which was packed with meetings with Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky and his new foreign minister Andrii Sybiha. But their mandate was clearly limited to solidarity and issuing strong words of support, without committing to specifics on the missile question.
“I’m delighted particularly to be here with David,” Blinken said. “The United States, the United Kingdom, united for Ukraine.” It was a nice phrase, in keeping with the Biden administration’s “as long as it takes” mantra of continued support for Kyiv, but it must have sounded maddeningly vague to his Ukrainian interlocutors. Perhaps hinting that there could yet be movement on the issue of long-rage strikes, he noted that that the US had “adjusted and adapted… as the battlefield has changed” and that Russia had already escalated the war by acquiring ballistic missiles from Iran. (Tehran has denied supplying missiles to Russia.)
“It is Putin who has escalated this week with the shipment of ballistic missiles from Iran,” Lammy reiterated at their joint press conference, as he warned that Russia’s autocratic enablers were already widening the war. “We’re seeing this new axis: Russia, Iran, North Korea. We urge China not to throw their lot in with this group of renegades.”
Lammy did not hold back in his condemnation of Russia’s assault on Ukraine. “[Vladimir] Putin’s barbaric actions are the latest example of a very old and evil story,” he said, invoking his own ancestor’s experience of being “enslaved, chained on a ship, and forced to work for the profit of a foreign empire.” He compared Putin to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the eighteenth-century Russian empress Catherine the Great. “This is imperialism,” he said. “This is fascism.”
But when he was asked directly whether the UK would therefore lift its restrictions on the use of long-range missiles, he deferred. “We’ve had detailed conversations today with President Zelensky,” Lammy said, and he would now “go back to Keir Starmer [and] assist him with some of the operational detail that we’ve learned from the Ukrainians.” The British prime minister would then discuss the issue with the US president Joe Biden during their planned meeting in Washington on Friday. It was the diplomatic equivalent of saying that the issue was above his pay grade. But his hosts will have noted that he did not say no. They will also have welcomed the approximately $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) the two men promised in additional humanitarian aid.
Under international law, there is little question that it would be legal for Ukraine to strike military targets inside Russia that are being used to mount attacks on its territory. But the real issue here is political. Since the start of this conflict, the US and its Western allies have sought to strike a balance between supplying military aid to enable Ukraine to defend itself and avoiding being drawn into a direct conflict with Russia themselves.
The oft-repeated paeans of Western unity and Ukraine’s valiant fight for freedom have long masked the reality that Kyiv and its foreign partners have different priorities, and beneath the surface, relations have frequently been strained. Ukraine is fighting a war for survival, where defeat means subjugation, even genocide. Whereas the US wants Ukraine to win, but not at any cost. For Washington, the more immediate priority than a Ukrainian victory is to make sure this war is contained. Ukraine’s recent incursion into the Kursk region of south-western Russia and the large-scale drone attack on Moscow earlier this week will have done little to calm nerves in Western capitals about how Kyiv might make use of American and British long-range missiles if the restrictions are lifted.
Zelensky understands that time is not on his side. Russia is bombarding Ukraine’s power grid ahead of another difficult winter, with around 70 per cent of the country’s power generation capacity already destroyed. He knows that if Donald Trump wins back the White House in November, he has already threatened to cut off American aid to Ukraine and force Kyiv and Moscow to come to terms. Asked whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war during the presidential debate on 10 September, the former president said only that he would “settle” it. The prospect of getting another package of military aid through the US congress any time soon, no matter which party is in power, also looks decidedly dubious. Ukraine does not have endless stocks of ammunition, or political capital, to burn.
So we should expect the Ukrainian president to continue to press his case in the strongest possible terms. Every week that Kyiv loses now means more Russian bombers striking Ukrainian towns and cities with impunity, and more lives and territory being lost. Fine words and declarations of support are undoubtedly welcome, but at this critical stage in the war, the ability to hit back matters more.
[See also: Why foreign affairs will define the Starmer era]
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