Making the Most of Ukraine’s Freedom to Strike Russia

After more than a year spent opposing the use of Western complex weapons to strike Russian territory, the Biden administration has come around to permitting the use of long-range US-made missiles against targets on Russian soil. The questions this volte face has prompted are what has changed to make it acceptable now, and what difference will it make for Ukraine? The answers to these questions are less about the damage that the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) can inflict, and more about what they might enable, and whether their provision is a catalyst for others like Germany to provide similar kinds of support.

Tough Choices

The US military has a finite number of ATACMS and is not producing any more. For other Western long-range weapons, production rates could not at present meet the number that need to be expended to achieve significant battlefield effects. A good example of this is how Ukraine fired the majority of the UK’s Storm Shadow arsenal at Russian deep targets in 2023 yet failed to degrade Russian command and control to a level that the Ukrainian military could take advantage of. Providing these weapons to Ukraine, therefore, exposes the donor to risks in their own plans for how they might fight a campaign.

Despite these limitations, the concentrated use of long-range weapons can inflict disproportionate damage against selected targets, thereby opening up exploitable opportunities in Russia’s defences. The question is whether the Ukrainian military is capable of exploiting the gap created. An example of such a ‘gap’ can be seen in the range of electronic warfare and strike capabilities used to seize a portion of Russia’s Kursk oblast in August 2024, which Ukraine was able to exploit.

Since late 2023, the trend in the Ukrainian military has been that it has taken more casualties than it has recruited. A significant proportion of these casualties have suffered minor wounds and the soldiers have returned to the force, but over time the result has been a hollowing out of units along the line of contact and thus a growing paucity in the defence that over the summer of 2024 reached a point where Russia could begin to make headway into Ukraine’s defences in Donbas. This has offered little capacity to exploit opportunities created by Russian vulnerabilities.

For Ukraine’s international partners, the long-held concern about unlocking the use of ATACMS against Russia is that the limited stocks of these weapons would be used in a manner that delayed the onset of pressure on the Ukrainian front, but as a result would defer the Ukrainian government’s willingness to address the unfavourable trend in its own force generation. It might affect the timeline of events without actually altering the trajectory, while the shock on the Russians might also never be repeated because of the consumption of weapons stocks. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ‘victory plan’ as briefed to partners in September 2024 did not address these fundamental issues.

What changed, then? Ukraine is rapidly approaching a point where if it does not address the manpower issue then it will struggle to defend the length of the front, and so the collapse in its fighting positions will accelerate. In this context, time to implement relevant reform is essential. Ukraine’s partners can do little to change the character of the fighting on the line of contact, but by targeting capabilities that are currently giving Russia a battlefield advantage, time can be bought.  

Hard Targets

The next question is what to strike. For any given target set there is a critical threshold of impacts that need to be achieved before there is a tangible effect on the fighting. When Ukraine achieved three spectacular strikes on Russian ammunition dumps, for example, while the volume of munitions destroyed was impressive, they would ultimately be replaced in time. The Ukrainians destroyed three of ten ammunition dumps at that echelon. The result was a reduction in rounds available for Russian units for a limited period, rather than a widespread scarcity of shells. If seven of the dumps had been hit, the effect would have been much more pronounced.

The Ukrainian military is not a very cohesive organisation. It has a variety of branches that are each inclined to pursue creative and often in themselves effective ends, but rarely at a decisive scale. This creativity is one of the Ukrainian military’s great strengths. But when it comes to deep strike, the lack of discipline in target selection often leads to a diffusion of effect such that the operational damage inflicted is less than the sum of the objects damaged or destroyed. 

The critical question with the ATACMS decision, therefore, is not that the munitions are now allowed to be used – there were in any case more operational targets inside Ukraine’s borders than the munitions available – but rather what is to be prioritised and how strikes will be synchronised with the wider arsenal of weapons, from Storm Shadow to Ukraine’s indigenous deep strike munitions. Complex salvos, after all, are far less likely to be defeated by Russian air defences.

Here there is a strategic question. Militarily, the targets are easy to determine. Destroying Russia’s ammunition dumps, or the fuelling and arming points for its strike aircraft, or Russian tactical-operational missile complexes, would have a useful effect in reducing the casualties being suffered by the Ukrainians, and thereby contribute to stabilising the front. But these are not the targets that will yield leverage in negotiations. Targets that yield leverage are largely economic and industrial. The challenge here is that the incoming US administration pushing negotiations is not the current administration approving strikes, and it seems unlikely that there is close strategic cooperation between them on how the latter could contribute to the former’s strategy.

Political Foibles

The question of escalation risk persistently lingers over this discussion. Unhelpfully, this has become stuck in a debate over whether any such weapon employment would lead to a nuclear response, which it certainly will not. The reality is that Russia can escalate in a range of ways to impose costs on the West, from undersea sabotage to the employment of proxies to harass trade in the Bab el-Mandeb. The fact that Russia has now tried to covertly smuggle bombs onto aircraft in Europe, sponsored the assassination of European industrialists and brought North Korean troops into a war on European soil all show that escalation is occurring. And it will cast a long shadow.

That does not mean that the risks in approving ATACMS use are unjustified, or strategically foolish. But to be effective, their use must be part of a wider strategy that targets a specific target set. This requires the coherent employment of ATACMS and munitions from other partners alongside Ukraine’s indigenous long-range strike systems. The Ukrainian military must also have a plan to exploit the effects achieved. The duration of the impact is ultimately a function of magazine depth, meaning that Germany’s willingness to supply Taurus will have a tangible impact on how significant the effect is. 

The critical question is the extent to which in the dying days of the current US administration the ATACMS will be used to further a broader targeting strategy to bring about military effects, and a negotiating strategy as regards political ones. Hopefully, the decision is not merely intended to be a ‘signal’ in response to the appearance of North Korean troops. Most importantly, if deep strikes help to reduce the pressure on the front, Kyiv must use the resulting time to strengthen the line of defence.

© RUSI, 2024

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