Despite months of constant pleas from Kiev and pressure from US lawmakers, the administration of US President Joe Biden is “holding firm... on its refusal” to supply Ukraine with the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing unnamed defense and administration officials.
Several officials “familiar with the issue” have dismissed the growing perception of a “slow, gravitational pull” toward approval of longer-range munitions, saying that there has been no change in US policy or even any kind of substantive discussion about it for months, the newspaper wrote.
Ukrainian officials had been planning a major counteroffensive for months, predicting that it would end in the recapture of all territories lost to Russia, including Crimea. The operation finally began in early June, but has so far failed to achieve any significant gains, despite heavy losses in manpower and hardware on the Ukrainian side.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky stated earlier this month that Kiev had hoped to launch its counteroffensive much sooner, but was hampered by a lack of Western-supplied weapons. He also complained that the Russian advantage in long-range weapons seriously complicated the counteroffensive.
“At this point, it’s very clear and understandable. We need and are waiting for decisions on ATACMS,” the head of Zelensky’s presidential staff, Andrey Ermak, said at the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday.
ATACMS missiles can strike targets as far as 300 kilometers (190 miles) away. Officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly said the US would not send long-range missiles to Ukraine because the precedent could provoke a wider conflict if the missiles were used to attack targets in Russia. However, the UK has since supplied Kiev with an unspecified number of its own Storm Shadow long-range missiles, a decision that was apparently run by Washington first.
The Pentagon’s stockpiles of ATACMS are also extremely limited, according to the paper. Lockheed Martin reportedly made only around 4,000 ATACMS since production began in the 1980s, with at least 900 sold to allies and many more used by the US Army in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.