Ukraine is reportedly closing in on receiving permission from the U.S. and the U.K. to strike territory deep inside Russia with supplied long-range weaponry.
The reports come as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy are in Kyiv this week, which marks the first joint visit of its kind for more than a decade.
Kyiv has long urged its Western allies, including the U.S., to allow it to strike targets deep within Russian territory using weaponry such as the Washington-supplied ATACMS, ground-launched ballistic missiles.
Such requests have so far been denied over fears that granting permission to Ukraine to strike Russian territory would escalate the conflict that Russian President Vladimir Putin began in February 2022.
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On Tuesday, Juliegrace Brufke, Axios’ Capitol Hill reporter, said she interviewed House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul about the matter on September 6.
“I talked to Blinken two days ago, and he is traveling with his counterpart from the UK to Kyiv to basically tell them that they will allow them [to hit Russia with ATACMS,” McCaul told Brufke, she wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
Politico also reported, citing a Western official and two people familiar with discussions, that the Biden administration was finalizing a plan to expand where Ukraine’s military can strike inside Russia with long-range weapons.
The Guardian in the U.K. reported on Wednesday that government sources had signaled that a decision had already been made to allow Kyiv’s military to use Storm Shadow cruise missiles on targets inside Russia.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in a press briefing on Wednesday that he believed that “all these decisions have already been made,” reported Tass, a Russian state-owned news agency.
“This can be assumed with a high degree of probability,” he told reporters. “At the moment, the media is simply conducting such an information campaign to formalize the decision that has already been made.”
Peskov continued, “The involvement of the U.S. and European states in the conflict around Ukraine is direct, immediate, and each new step increases the level of this involvement.”
Russia’s response to such strikes “will be appropriate,” he added.
Blinken said the topic of granting Ukraine permission to use its long-range weaponry to strike targets deep inside Russia would be discussed during his visit with Lammy to Kyiv, which began on Wednesday.
In a joint news conference with Lammy in London on Tuesday, Blinken was asked if time had come to allow Ukraine the freedom to use the supplied long-range missiles to hit targets deep in Russia.
“One of the purposes of the trip that we’ll be taking together is to hear directly from the Ukrainian leadership, including [President Volodymyr] Zelensky, about exactly how the Ukrainians see their needs, in this moment, to what objectives, and what we can do to support those needs,” he replied.
“So all I can tell you is we’ll be listening intently to our Ukrainian partners. We’ll both be reporting back to the prime minister [Keir Starmer], to President Biden, in the coming days, and I fully anticipate this is something they will take up when they meet on Friday,” Blinken added.
Newsweek has contacted Russia’s Defense Ministry for comment by email.
The Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. think tank, said on August 27 that hundreds of known Russian military and paramilitary objects in Russia were in range of Ukraine’s Washington-supplied ATACMS.
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