Prime Minister Keir Starmer meets US President Joe Biden for a bilateral meeting at The White House. Picture by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street
There has been mounting speculation in recent weeks in the media that the West could soon sanction the use, by Ukraine, of long-range missiles, like the Franco-British Storm Shadow, on targets inside Russia. The government in Kyiv has been pressing for this, and the call was championed vociferously by the British government. The argument put, though not evidenced, is that such a switch in Western policy would significantly aid Ukraine against Russia.
However, that view does not appear to be universally held in the West. Indeed, it appears that there is significant hesitation to accede to Ukraine’s latest demand for more advanced weapons. That hesitation was openly put by Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, who said that Germany would not supply Ukraine with its own long-range Taurus missile.
It was more indirectly expressed by the failure of US President Joe Biden and the British PM Sir Keir Starmer to announce Storm Shadow permission after they met in the US on 13 September. While that does not mean that permission will not be granted at a later date, it does suggest that there is hesitancy in Washington around the move.
The Military Front
It is not hard to see why. Firing long-range missiles on military targets inside Russia might disrupt Russian logistics, by forcing Moscow to move its aircraft and military depos deeper into Russia. Yet it is difficult to see how it would significantly help Ukraine fend off Russia’s advances in the Donbas.
Russia’s advantages in manpower and in the industrial-scale production of key military materiel like artillery shells – in which it outproduces the West by 3 to 1 – give it an edge over Ukraine. The Kyiv government’s mounting struggles with mobilising enough soldiers mean that, even if it were to receive more Western weapons, it would still struggle.
In fact, Russian troops are continuing to creep forward across the front, slowly encircling major targets like the town of Pokrovsk, a critical transport and logistics hub. Meanwhile, Russia has also massed tens of thousands of troops to throw at a mounting counter-offensive against Ukrainian troops in Russia’s Kursk region.
So, there seems to be little military gain to allowing Ukraine to fire long-range missiles on military targets inside Russia. The risk of escalation, however, is significant. Russia has, of course, warned that it would see the use of Western long-range missiles on targets on its territory as Nato directly going to war with Russia.
Some commentators point out that the Russian President Vladimir Putin has made such comments in the past, but has rarely acted decisively on them. He warned against the supply of tanks, long-range missiles and F-16s. Yet these have all arrived, and in fact some of that military hardware has been used in Ukraine’s invasion of the Kursk region in Russia. Will anything significantly change if Ukraine uses Storm Shadows against targets inside Russia?
Danger
The trouble with this logic is that, while the West has been slow and careful to escalate, in terms of taking time between supplying Ukraine with weaponry, and then only slowly changing the terms of use, Russia has also been slowly escalating in response. Even if the escalation has so far remained controlled, that does not give any guarantees it will remain so in the future.
For one, the use of long-range missiles appears to require significant direct logistical support by the Western states that produce them. Earlier this year, when initially pressed to give Taurus missiles to Ukraine, Scholz referred to British troops helping with ‘target control’ with Storm Shadow missiles in refusing a similar role for German troops. While London denied the charge, Putin has used the same arguments in recent days, saying that Nato states would now be helping Ukraine target sites inside Russia if they allowed the use of long-range missiles inside its territory.
The fear in Germany appears also to be that, unsupervised, Ukraine might use the missiles to attack dual-use targets, like Russia’s energy or even nuclear sector. After all, officials in the West claim that Kyiv did not clear its Kursk incursion with Western capitals. Were Ukraine to attack civilian targets in Russia with Western missiles, how would Moscow react then?
The implicit threat that this may happen may explain the timing of Ukraine’s latest demand for the permission to fire long-range missiles inside Russia. With winter coming, it is widely expected that Russia will attempt to further degrade Ukraine’s already hard-hit energy infrastructure, which is running at an estimated one third of its pre-war capacity.
To do so, Russia will rely on its overwhelming long-range missile superiority. The trouble for Ukraine is that the West produces fewer capable anti-rocket interceptors than Russia makes long-range missiles. Thus, according to the Guardian, Lockheed Martin manufactures around 550 of the most capable PAC-3 MSE interceptors, while Russia might be able to produce 1,200 missiles per year. Moreover, Russia is rumoured to have received its first shipment of short-range, high-speed ballistic missiles from Iran.
Negotiations
As we move towards winter, then, the human cost of the war could yet rise exponentially for all sides, especially for Ukraine. Although most Ukrainians still want to fight on, support for negotiations with Russia has been steadily growing since the failed Ukrainian summer offensive last year, according to opinion polls. War weariness is also rising in the West. Last month, for example, the parties of the ruling centre-left coalition were punished severely in several state elections in eastern Germany. It was clear that the war in Ukraine was one of the issues that contributed to the drubbing.
Partly as a result, Scholz has broken ranks with Western leaders in recent days and said that any peace talks to halt Putin’s invasion of Ukraine should also include Russia. He is currently the only major Western leader to have done so, but it is evident that reticence about the Ukraine war in Washington is linked to the uncertainty about the outcome of the US election in November.
When it appeared earlier this year that Donald Trump, who is seen as more favourable to treating with Putin, was the frontrunner against the lacklustre incumbent Joe Biden, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky appeared to be open to peace talks including Russia. In July, during peace talks in Switzerland which excluded Russia, Zelensky suggested a second round of peace talks, likely in November, could include Russia.
Meanwhile, Putin last week indicated he was willing to treat on the basis of the terms agreed between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators in April 2022. It is likely that Putin feels he has the upper hand in any negotiations given Russia’s military advances in recent months. Any peace deal arising from such a situation will likely be worse for Ukraine than it was in April 2022.
But the truth is that the human and wider costs of this war are only likely to spiral should it continue. Ordinary people the world over will continue to pay the costs of the war, above all Ukrainians.
That is why it is time for anti-war movements globally to put pressure on their governments to push for a ceasefire and to come to the table to negotiate a peace. It is time to put welfare ahead of warfare. It is also time to build a left that can, not only push for peace, but for a world without the competitive pressures that give rise to imperialist war in the first place.