Washington has made it “clear” that it cannot provide Kiev with any significant number of MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) in the foreseeable future, CNN reported on Saturday, citing an unnamed US official.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov met with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon this week to discuss additional military aid. During the meeting he reportedly presented him with a list of “high-value” targets that Kiev would like to strike, deep inside Russia, using American-made weapons.
In an interview with CNN after the meeting, Umerov claimed that Ukraine is pushing to lift the ATACMS restrictions for “self-defense,” arguing that “the airfields being used to hit our cities are within the range of deep strikes.”
However, a US defense official told the channel that many of the targets on Ukraine’s wish list are in fact outside the missile’s range, as Moscow has relocated its high-value assets away from the front.
The US has also “made it clear that Kiev should not expect another significant delivery of ATACMS due to the finite number in US inventories and the long production time of the weapon,” CNN wrote, citing the source. The official noted that Ukraine has so far received a very “limited” supply of these missiles.
The US government seemingly drew the line on deep strikes into Russia after one of its ATACMS rockets, armed with a cluster warhead, struck a Crimean beach in early June. Moscow accused Washington of enabling that and other acts of “terrorism” against civilians, and suggested it might arm “states and entities” around the world that are hostile to the US in response.
Pentagon spokesman Major General Patrick Ryder clarified on Tuesday that Washington’s “policy has not changed,” meaning that Ukraine is allowed to use US-supplied weapons to defend against cross-border attacks but not for “deep strikes” into what the US recognizes as Russian territory. However, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Monday that Washington “will keep the conversations with the Ukrainians going.”
Moscow has warned that any talk of using long-range missiles to strike Russian territory is highly dangerous.
“This is blackmail, it is an attempt to create an impression that the West wants to avoid excessive escalation, but in fact this is a ruse,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a press conference on Tuesday. “The West does not want to avoid escalation. The West is asking for trouble, to put it bluntly. I reckon that this is already obvious to everyone.”