Antony Blinken and David Lammy’s joint trip to Kyiv, to be followed by Keir Starmer’s trip to Washington DC to see Joe Biden on Friday, has inevitably lifted expectations that Ukraine will shortly be given permission to fire Anglo-French Storm Shadow and US Atacms missiles, which have a range of 190 miles plus, into Russia.
There are no shortage of risks. Allowing Ukraine to fire western-made weapons deep into Russia could have a dramatic political impact on the course of a war mired in a grim, attritional slog that appears to be favouring Moscow, whose forces are bearing down on the strategic town of Pokrovsk.
Blinken and Lammy provided a potential justification for the missile escalation on Tuesday, censuring Iran for supplying a first batch of short-range, high-speed Fath-360 ballistic missiles to Russia, a step up from the slower Shahed drones it has given Moscow until now. Russia was likely to use the missiles “within weeks”, Blinken warned.
The Fath-360 missiles have a range of about 75 miles, according to the US. They could be used to strike Ukrainian cities close to the frontline such as Kharkiv or Zaporizhzhia, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk in the Donbas, and even theoretically Kyiv, and allow Russian to use its own stock of longer-range cruise and ballistic missiles to attack targets elsewhere in Ukraine, as it has done throughout the war.
The missile war in Ukraine may appear unceasing, but it follows its own logic of inventories, with Russia’s goal being to exhaust Ukraine’s air defences. Kyiv has already run out of short-range Buk and S-300 systems, which left its power stations defenceless earlier this year. Ukrainian sources estimate that about two-thirds of its energy generation has been destroyed, and it will not be possible to repair more than a fraction before what is likely to be the country’s hardest winter since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion.
A similar strategy will be in the Kremlin’s mind when it comes to higher-value air defence systems, notably the US-made Patriots. Biden announced the donation of four Patriot systems at the Nato summit in July, but a limiting factor is the number of interceptor missiles that can be manufactured. This year Lockheed Martin, which makes the most capable PAC-3 MSE interceptors, expects to manufacture 550.
Ukrainian sources are concerned that the number of offensive missiles the Russians can fire could exceed the world’s ability to manufacture interceptors, even if Kyiv has other air defences such as Samp/T and Nasams. One estimate circulating in Kyiv is that Russia can make 1,200 missiles a year, though reliable numbers are impossible to come by. Other figures are lower: an estimate from the Rusi thinktank puts it at 420 Kh-101 cruise missiles plus a handful of high-speed ballistics.
The key point is that as long as the Kremlin believes it can win, or can retain the initiative, in an attritional war, it has no incentive to consider negotiations. Even allowing for the surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk province, it is Kyiv that is struggling. Experts hope that Ukraine can hold on to Pokrovsk, the gateway to the Donbas, for the rest of this year, but Russia holds a force advantage estimated at four or five to one – and soldier numbers are the one area where the west cannot help.
What infuriates Ukraine is that it cannot hit back at military targets inside Russia with powerful missiles because the west, led by the White House, has not allowed Storm Shadow and Atacms to be used there. However, the signals of the last few days are that the prohibition is not absolute. Bill Burns, the CIA chief, said on Saturday he was sure Biden “will consider other ways” that Ukraine could be helped as the war heads towards its third winter.
The complication is that it is hard to imagine the US, the UK or the other countries involved in the manufacture of Storm Shadow, France and Italy, simply giving Ukraine a free hand in where it might bomb inside Russia. It would not be hard to work out if either weapon had been used, and a miscalculation by Kyiv, perhaps killing a lot of civilians, would have wider consequences. Nor are there large stocks of either weapon, prompting scepticism in the US that they could turn the tide.
An effective use of long-range missiles might come only as part of a wider military plan, if Ukraine has one. At the end of August, Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff to Voldoymyr Zelenskiy, visited Washington, where it was reported that he would present a list of targets that Ukraine believed could be effectively bombed. The complication is that such discussions appear to bring the US and the UK closer to the heart of Ukrainian planning on how it wants to attack Russia.
Ukrainian insiders have also talked about using the threat of long-range missiles against Russia to try to force an end to the war, through a “demonstration strike” that would make clear to the Kremlin that it is possible to threaten the heartlands around Moscow. It is not obvious if Moscow would react so benignly, however, which may be why Burns, starkly, said the west should not be intimidated by Russian threats of nuclear escalation, raising the possibility that Putin may do just that.
Zelenskiy argued at a meeting of western defence ministers in Germany last week that being able to strike into its enemy’s territory would help ensure “Russia is motivated to seek peace”. But the calibration has to be careful. Time may be short for Ukraine, given that a US election looms in less than two months, and on Tuesday, one of the candidates, Donald Trump, would not say if he wanted Ukraine to win.
Missile diplomacy may not have been so significant since the time of the cold war.