Russia has accused Nato and the US of “provoking a new level of tension” after the US and Germany became the latest allies to let Ukraine’s military to use Western-supplied weapons to strike targets inside Russia.
A Berlin spokesman said Germany was convinced Ukraine had the right to defend itself from Russia, especially from cross-border attacks on its second largest city Kharkiv.
US officials said American-supplied weapons could be used to counter Russian fire near the Kharkiv region, either where Russian forces were “hitting them or preparing to hit them”.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said the decision would help protect civilians living in villages close to the Russian border.
I mean, it is an escalation. But on the other hand, there’s not a whole lot by way of other reasonable response to Russia using the previous policy for tactical benefit, being able to attack without being attacked.
I think that there are basically two options that don’t involve Ukraine being disadvantaged:
What was done here, permit limited cross-border use.
Maybe try to work out some kind of terms on which Russia agrees not to do cross-border attacks. But the problem there is enforcement. For Ukraine to be able to pull people away from a border, they have to be very sure that Russia will not attack across that border. If Russia leverages this and builds up to a major attack across the border and breaking that agreement, in order to make it clearly not worthwhile, we’d have to have serious consequences for Russia. I don’t know what would be sufficiently-dissuasive short of attacking Russian forces ourselves.
And if Russia had refrained from exploiting that policy, they also wouldn’t be facing the current change.
I also feel like the broader goal of avoiding Russian cities being attacked is still generally intact, and it’s not as if Russia has extended a comparable policy of trying to limit damage to Ukrainian cities. Quite the opposite, really. And given that Russia is trying to conquer Ukraine and take those cities for themselves, if anyone’s got incentive to try to cut some kind of agreement to not damage Ukrainian cities, aside from Ukraine, you’d think that it’d be Russia.