Marc Champion: Want peace for Ukraine? Let it strike in Russia.
One week into Ukraine’s counterstrike into Russia’s Kursk region, we still have only a hazy picture of what is happening on the ground and know still less about the operation’s aims. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing – if we don’t know, Russian decision makers may be having to guess, too, making their response that much more difficult.
A lot of analytical ink has been spilled on what the goals of Ukraine’s top commander, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, and his boss, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, might be. Speculation ranges from replaying Syrskyi’s successful 2022 Kharkiv offensive to boost sagging morale at home, to making Russia divert forces to protect its the borders or grabbing territory to hold for exchange in future negotiations.
Kyiv will have many simultaneous goals and is likely to run with whichever works as events unfold. It could be weeks or months before we know if this was a brilliant, high-risk maneuver that changed the direction of a war increasingly playing to Russian advantages in manpower and munitions, or a disaster that pulled thousands of experienced Ukrainian troops from already strained defensive lines, only to waste them on a vanity project.
There is, however, at least one conclusion that Western leaders should be drawing already, because this kind of attack was inevitable in a state-on-state war. The only surprise is that it came so late – two-and-a-half years into President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – and that’s primarily because of Western restrictions on the use of donated weapons within Russia’s internationally recognized borders. Now Ukrainian troops are driving U.S.-made Bradley fighting vehicles into Russia.
It’s been absurd to consider those frontiers sacrosanct since the moment Putin sent troops across them; at that point they ceased to be agreed boundaries and became part of a battlefield. Russia has no compunction in sending Iranian and North Korean rockets and missiles, let alone its own, into Ukraine from deep inside Russian territory, and there’s no reason it should be immune from reciprocal attacks. It was Putin’s choice, not Zelenskiy’s or NATO’s, to turn Russian territory into a war zone.
Ukrainians often lament that the Kremlin’s single greatest strategic success since the invasion’s start has been to persuade the U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies that unless they self-regulated their provision of arms to Kyiv, Putin would launch a nuclear attack. Whether this boiling-the-frog strategy was necessary is a counterfactual, so impossible to answer with certainty. But the argument now looks threadbare.
In the past week alone, Ukraine sent a significant force to seize control of territory across the international border; blew up a major airfield and munitions depot outside Lipetsk, a town almost 249 miles inside Russia; sank a modern Kilo class submarine; and took delivery of its first F-16 fighter jets. Dozens more so-called red lines have been crossed since the start of Russian hostilities, when Germany dared send only helmets to aid Kyiv’s defense. Putin has yet to make the decision to go nuclear – because it would do him far more harm than good.
The U.S., nonetheless, still imposes some limits on Ukrainian weapons use. These include restrictions on launching American-donated ATACMS, a surface-to-surface missile with a range of up to 300 kilometers, into Russia. With Ukraine already freed to use the UK’s similarly ranged Storm Shadow cruise missiles, and hitting distant airfields and oil refineries with its own drones, it is surely time to let ATACMS be used to strike any military target that’s furthering Russia’s war effort.
That’s especially true if you want to argue honestly for negotiations to end the war. No one can seriously contend Ukraine aims to conquer and annex any part of Russia; even holding the recently taken strip of cross-border territory until eventual peace talks would be a very tall order. Yet the fastest way to force Putin to the table for a lasting peace may well be to demonstrate that so long as he continues his invasion, Russia, too, will never be safe from attack or able to prosper as it should.
“We document all locations from which the Russian army launches strikes, including the Belgorod region, the Kursk region and other regions,” Zelenskiy said in an address to the nation on Sunday evening. That includes, he said, 2,000 missile, drone, artillery and mortar strikes on Ukraine’s Sumy region from around Kursk alone. “It is entirely fair for Ukraine to respond to this terror in the way necessary to stop it.”
Zelenskiy went on to spell out that he was talking about long-range missiles to hit Russian launch sites and logistics chains, and urged allies to lift their remaining restrictions. I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument as to why he’s wrong to make that request, or why it shouldn’t be granted.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.