Washington: The Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing unnamed defense and administration officials, that President Joe Biden's Administration is no closer to changing its policy on providing Ukraine with the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), despite months of persistent pleas from Kiev and pressure from some US lawmakers.
According to the newspaper, a number of officials who are "familiar with the issue" have disputed the notion that there is a "slow, gravitational pull" in favor of approving longer-range munitions. They claimed that there hasn't been any change in US policy or even any kind of meaningful discussion about it in months.
For months, Ukrainian authorities had been considering a significant counterattack, which they claimed would result in the retaking of all territories lost to Russia, including Crimea. Early in June saw the official start of the operation, but despite significant losses on the Ukrainian side in terms of manpower and equipment, no notable progress has been made to date.
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Vladimir Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, asserted earlier this month that Kiev had hoped to begin its military pushback much earlier but was constrained by a dearth of weapons supplied by the West. Additionally, he lamented the fact that Kiev's counteroffensive is significantly complicated by Russia's advantage in long-range weapons.
It's now very obvious and understandable. Andrey Yermak, the president's chief of staff, reaffirmed this need for decisions on ATACMS at the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday.
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The range of an ATACMS missile is up to 300 kilometers (190 miles). The US wouldn't send such long-range missiles to Ukraine, according to officials in the Biden administration, because doing so could set a precedent for using them to attack targets in Russian territory, which would lead to a larger conflict. However, the UK has since given Kiev an unknown quantity of its own Storm Shadow long-range missiles; this decision, it appears, was first made by Washington.
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The paper claims that the Pentagon's ATACMS stockpiles are also very small. At least 900 of the 4,000 ATACMS produced by Lockheed Martin since production began in the 1980s were sold to allies, and the US Army used many more during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.