These limitations on Ukraine really need to be lifted. Ukraine needs freedom to attack the best strategic targets they can, whether they are in Ukraine occupied areas or in Russia. Since Russia annexed the occupied territories, there’s not a big difference anyway.
The only problem I see is that it’s escalatory. If Ukraine starts using Western-supplied weapons for offensive operations, this situation goes from supplying war material for defense (under-the-table proxy war) to full-on overt proxy war. Russia will spin this as “NATO is using Ukraine to attack us” (though they’re probably doing that already).
I can’t see how this won’t lead to a wider conflict.
There IS a full scale war going on. 31,000 confirmed dead Ukranian soldiers, and up to 120,000 dead Russian soldiers. We don’t even have a good idea how many civilian deaths, but the total death toll could be as high as 500,000.
And no, before you start - Mutually Assured Destruction isn’t “a full scale war”. Its Annihilation of both sides, and has no precedent in the history of war.
Putin can’t even hold his own territory. I don’t think even he would open another front by attacking a NATO member even if the west started greenlighting their weapons be used in the incursion.
We already crossed many times their “red lines”. This is just the good old “China’s Final Warning”.
They are already barely managing to slowly advance against a single foe, which is still transitioning between the old soviet warfare ways toward NATO’s one, with far less soldiers, I doubt they would ever hold against the full alliance firepower.
Russia is Already losing to U.S. weapons being used by Ukraine. Do you really think they want to find out what U.S. weapons used by the U.S. feels like?
I will admit that I am confounded by how often I agree with Boris Johnson’s views on providing military aid to Ukraine, considering I almost always vehemently disagree with him on pretty much anything and everything else.
Yeah he’s one of the very few Western politicians who is taking the threat Russia poses to European security seriously. I found it unexpected tbh considering all of his other views.
Doesn’t Storm Shadow require Western operators to program targets? I want Ukraine to win this war of national survival (unlike the US administration) but Western operators programming missiles to hit targets in Russia does sound escalatory to me. I’d rather see Ukraine receive a decent number of F16s (i.e. much more than currently pledged) with corresponding munitions. There’s a lot of really useful stuff in the Western arsenal that would otherwise remain unused forever, including older-gen glide bombs & standoff weapons. It’s not going to be the Wunderwaffen winning this war, anyway. But an ample supply of decent weapons could work wonders. Just look at the success of Russia’s cheap glide bomb upgrades. (Sorry for the wall of text, by the way, but I can’t get Connect for Android to retain line breaks)
Amen. Dude totally fucked the UK for a hundred years. Not that I’m crying over it, given their past, but the regular people deserved better than Brexit.