Moscow warns US against allowing Ukraine to strike Russian soil with longer-range weapons

kyiv, Ukraine (AP) The Kremlin warned Monday that President Joe Biden's decision to let Ukraine strike targets in Russia with long-range missiles supplied by the United States would add fuel to the fire of war and further escalate tensions. international tensions.

Biden's policy shift has added a new factor of uncertainty to the conflict on the eve of the 1,000-day mark since Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022.

It also happened when a Russian ballistic missile equipped with cluster munitions struck a residential area in Sumy, northern Ukraine, killing 11 people and injuring 84 others. Another missile barrage sparked apartment fires in the southern port of Odessa, killing at least 10 people and injuring 43 others, Ukraine's Interior Ministry said.

Washington is easing limits on what Ukraine can strike with its U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACM, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Sunday, after months of ruling out such a move. measure for fear of an escalation of the conflict and a direct reaction. confrontation between Russia and NATO.

The Kremlin quickly condemned the decision.

It is clear that the outgoing administration in Washington intends to take steps, and has spoken about them, to continue to add fuel to the fire and provoke a further escalation of tensions around this conflict, he said. said spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.

The scope of the new shooting guidelines is unclear. But the change came after the United States, South Korea and NATO said North Korean troops were in Russia and would apparently be deployed to help Moscow drive Ukrainian troops out of the Russian border region of Kursk .

Biden's decision was almost entirely triggered by North Korea's entry into the fight, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, and was made just before his departure for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Peru.

Russia is also slowly pushing the outnumbered Ukrainian army back into the eastern Donetsk region. It also led a devastating air campaign against civilian areas in Ukraine.

Peskov referred reporters to a statement by President Vladimir Putin in September in which he said allowing Ukraine to target Russia would significantly raise the stakes.

This would radically change the very nature of the conflict, Putin said at the time. This would mean that NATO countries, the United States and European countries, would be at war with Russia.

Peskov claimed that Western countries supplying long-range weapons also provided targeting services to Kyiv. This fundamentally changes the terms of their involvement in the conflict, he said.

Putin warned in June that Moscow could provide longer-range weapons to other countries to strike Western targets if NATO allows Ukraine to use its allies' weapons to attack Russian territory. After signing a treaty with North Korea, Putin explicitly threatened to supply weapons to Pyongyang, stressing that Moscow could mirror Western arguments that it was up to Ukraine to decide how to use them.

The West supplies weapons to Ukraine and says: we no longer control anything here and it does not matter how they are used. Putin said. Well, we can also say: we provided something to someone – and we don't control anything. And let them think about it.

Putin also reiterated that Moscow was ready to use nuclear weapons if it saw a threat to its sovereignty.

Biden's decision will mean the direct involvement of the United States and its satellites in military action against Russia, as well as a radical change in the essence and nature of the conflict, the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office on January 20, has expressed uncertainty about his administration's continued military support for Ukraine. He also pledged to end the war quickly.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday gave a quiet response to the approval he and his government have sought for more than a year, adding: “The missiles will speak for themselves.”

The consequences of the new policy are uncertain. ATACMS, which have a range of about 300 kilometers (190 miles), can reach far behind the front line of about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) in Ukraine, but their range is relatively short compared to other types of ballistic and cruise missiles.

The policy change came too late to have a major strategic effect, said Patrick Bury, an associate professor of security at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.

The ultimate impact this will likely have will be to slow the pace of ongoing Russian offensives, he said, adding that Ukraine could strike targets in Kursk, logistics centers or command headquarters.

Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, acknowledged that the U.S. decision would not change the course of the war, noting that Ukraine would need large stockpiles of ATACMS, which it does not possess and which it will not receive because American supplies are limited.

Politically, the move is a boost for the Ukrainians and gives them a window of opportunity to try to show that they are still viable and worth supporting as Trump prepares to take office, a said Matthew Savill, director of military science at the Royal United Services Institute in London.

The signal for the policy shift was the arrival of North Korean troops in Russia, according to Glib Voloskyi, an analyst at the CBA Initiatives Center, a kyiv-based think tank.

This is a signal the Biden administration is sending to North Korea and Russia that the decision to involve North Korean units crossed a red line, he said.

Russian lawmakers and state media criticized the West for what they called an escalatory move, threatening a harsh response.

Biden, apparently, has decided to end his presidential term and go down in history as Bloody Joe, lawmaker Leonid Slutsky told Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

Vladimir Dzhabarov, deputy head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the upper house of Parliament, called this a very big step towards the outbreak of World War III and an attempt to reduce Trump's degree of freedom.

Russian newspapers made similar dire predictions. The madmen who drag NATO into a direct conflict with our country may soon suffer greatly, Rossiyskaya Gazeta said.

Some NATO allies welcomed the move.

President Andrzej Duda of Poland, a country bordering Ukraine, hailed the decision as a very important, perhaps even decisive, moment in the war.

In recent days, we have seen a decisive intensification of Russian attacks against Ukraine, especially these missile attacks that attack civilian objects and kill people, ordinary Ukrainians, Duda said.

The easing of restrictions on Ukraine is a good thing, said Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna of neighboring Estonia.

We have said from the beginning that no restrictions should be placed on military support, he told senior European Union diplomats in Brussels. And we have to understand that the situation is more serious than it was perhaps a few months ago.

But Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, known for his pro-Russian views, described Biden's decision as an unprecedented escalation that would prolong the war.

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Matthew Lee in Washington, Lorne Cook in Brussels, Danica Kirka in London, Hanna Arhirova in Kyiv, and Karel Janicek in Prague, Czech Republic, contributed.

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Follow AP's coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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