EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW — For the first time, the Biden Administration has authorized Ukraine to use long-range ATACMS missiles to strike targets inside Russia, a policy change that officials said was a response to the deployment of thousands of North Korean troops to the war.
It’s a reversal that some are calling Joe Biden’s “parting gift” to Ukraine. Others are saying it’s a gesture that has come far too late. And there are mixed answers as to what impact the policy shift will have on the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had pleaded for the change, arguing that Russian arsenals and bases should be fair game if they were being used to attack Ukrainian land. The Biden Administration resisted, fearing an escalation with Russia, after repeated warnings from the Kremlin that the use of Western weapons against its territory would be treated as an act of war. In September, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that using the missiles against Russia would “change the very essence, the nature of the conflict,” and warned that Russia would retaliate. Putin also announced revisions to Russia’s nuclear doctrine – and formalized them Tuesday – another thinly-veiled warning to the West: unleash the ATACMS at your peril.
Can the change in policy change the course of the war? The ATACMS are a supersonic guided missile system with a maximum range of about 190 miles. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) has identified more than 200 Russian military sites within that range of the Ukrainian frontier. Some reports said the ATACMS had only been authorized for use in the Kursk area, where the North Korean troops are deployed. But one official told The Washington Post that it could expand to other areas of Russia.
There is a certain race-against-time quality to the policy change; it comes as the Biden Administration moves to spend every penny of appropriated U.S. aid to Ukraine before Inauguration Day. White House officials have said they want to put Ukraine in the best possible position ahead of any negotiations that President-elect Donald Trump has said he will initiate when he takes office.
“President Biden has committed to making sure that every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and January 20th,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters last week in Brussels, one week after Trump’s win.
Among the questions now: How will Ukraine use the new authority? What can be done on the battlefield in the two months between now and Trump’s inauguration? Fundamentally, can the loosening of these restrictions alter the cause of the war?
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges (Ret.), a Cipher Brief expert and former Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe, has been a forceful advocate for the lifting of restrictions since the early days of the war. He called the Biden Administration’s decision too late but still welcome, and said it could help give Trump "all the leverage in the world" in any negotiations with Moscow.
Gen. Hodges spoke to Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski to discuss the policy change, how Ukrainian commanders may use the new authority, and the implications for the war against the Russians.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Nagorski: General Hodges, you have been, since the early days of the war, an advocate for more aid for Ukraine. How important is this policy change in your view?
Gen. Hodges: Well, this should have happened years ago. And it reminds us that the administration, despite all the good things it's done, has still failed to do the most important task, which is to clearly identify the strategic objective of the war. And if you don't have a clearly defined objective, it's very difficult to come up with good, clear, effective policy.
Having said that, obviously I'm glad that the administration has done this.
If you can destroy headquarters, artillery and logistics, then what you end up with are thousands of unlucky, untrained Russian and North Korean infantry that are not going to be effective against well-prepared Ukrainian defenses. The whole Russian way of fighting is to pound, pound, pound with artillery and then push in these human-wave attacks, because obviously they don't care about casualties. So if you take away the headquarters, you take away the artillery and you take away the logistics, specifically ammunition, it dramatically degrades the [Russian] advantage of mass.
Nagorski: We've had the first public account of the use of the ATACMS missiles on Russian soil – in Bryansk, right next to Kursk province. What do you glean from what you're hearing about this first report of their use?
Gen. Hodges: Well, if this is accurate, then this is exactly the kind of target that I would have hoped they would attack – a huge ammunition storage site that, given its location, is where the Russians would have been supporting their attacks by Russian and North Korean troops against the Ukrainian Kursk bridgehead.
This is exactly the kind of target that the ATACMS was designed to take out. So I applaud their targeting process.
Nagorski: “Long-range” is a bit of a misnomer to some. I believe these weapons have a reach of 190 miles or so. What sorts of things are within that range for the Ukrainians to go after?
Gen. Hodges: According to the Institute for the Study of War, there are still hundreds of meaningful targets that are out there, still inside range, despite the fact that the administration waited so long and the Russians were able to move some of their capabilities further away.
Given the Russian logistics system, to keep ammunition and other supplies moving forward for these thousands of troops, you're going to have to bring ammunition close. Artillery, rocket launchers, these things are going to be within 30 to 50 kilometers – that's 20 to 40 miles. So all of this is well within the ATACMS range. And of course the headquarters that are coordinating the movement, the attacks, these things will be in range as well. So they will not have a shortage of targets.
Nagorski: We happen to be talking two months before the inauguration of President Trump. And there's a kind of race against time in some quarters to get stuff done. Let's assume for the time being – and we don't know this – that they've got two months to work with before some peace deal gets negotiated. How much damage can Ukraine do with these rules having been changed?
Gen. Hodges: You are right that a lot can happen in two months, if there's the appropriate sense of urgency in the allocation of resources.
I think that the United States and our allies should be doing everything we can to push everything that's already approved, everything that's already forward positioned in Germany or Poland. Get that out. These are things that have already been paid for, approved, agreed. Get that out. That would be a priority in my mind. And I'm sure the loggies (logistics teams) are working hard on this.
I think [President Biden] actually has done a favor for the Trump administration by getting this in place. President Trump walks in, now it's a better situation for Ukraine. So it adds to the huge amount of leverage Trump will have over the Kremlin.
Taking out or reducing Russia's ability to attack Ukrainian cities and the infrastructure would be a high priority for the [Ukrainian] general staff now, I'm sure, and for the government. As always, you never have enough ammunition to service all the targets you have. And so there's a very demanding, rigorous targeting priority process that they'll be going through.
They have other weapons that they're using to hit these targets. They're using their own drones that are much longer-range to go after Russian oil and gas infrastructure, which I think is a great target because this is what keeps Russia in the war – their ability to export oil and gas to China and India. Eliminating that or damaging that contributes to Ukraine's effort as well.
Nagorski: In addition to your advocacy for these changes and for more weaponry for Ukraine, you have questioned how real Vladimir Putin's “red lines” really are. These restrictions on the ATACMS were a very clear red line – it was in September that Putin said, You do this and NATO is basically entering the war. Is it just hollow rhetoric in your view?
Gen. Hodges: The Russians have thousands of nuclear warheads, and they don't care how many innocent people are killed, including their own. So you can't just totally dismiss it. But as I think about why and where they might use a nuclear weapon, there is no place on the battlefield that they could change anything tactically by using a tactical nuclear weapon. There's no place where you would blow a hole in defenses, because they don't have the forces that could exploit them the way they did during the Cold War. So there's no benefit for them there.
China and India have both said (to Russia), Do not use nuclear weapons. So when I try to think, why would they do it, and would they do it, there's no benefit. The only benefit for Russia comes from this threat, because they see how easily deterred we are, and that we have this excessive fear that they might actually use a nuclear weapon. So whenever necessary, they'll say, we just updated our [nuclear] doctrine, or we're just doing an exercise in Belarus, or if you do this, we're going to do this.
Nagorski: And is there anything else short of a nuclear option that you think is a concern, regarding the escalatory ladder, if that's the right term?
Gen. Hodges: That's the right question to ask, but what else can they do? They launched one of the biggest air raids of the war the other night. The day after German Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz called Putin and said, Hey, you need to stop this, the very next day, Putin answered with a massive airstrike against civilian targets.
So he is not interested in any sort of real negotiation. I think that for the Russian side, as long as they've got bodies, they will keep pushing them into the fight. And that is why North Korea's contribution of thousands of troops is just as important as their ammunition contributions.
I'm very bullish on Ukraine. Of course, it's difficult for them right now. But after 11 years of war [since the first Russian invasion in 2014], Russia has suffered over 700,000 casualties. They only control 20 % of Ukraine. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is either underwater or moving east in the Black Sea.
Nagorski: Circling back to something you said a moment ago about how these next two months, this race to the finish, could help President-elect Trump, if he is indeed going to try to broker something with the Kremlin to end the war: How might the lessening of these restrictions help in that regard?
Gen. Hodges: It will help Ukraine continue to protect their bridgehead in the Kursk area. This is going to be a problem for the Russians. What Putin has made clear is, he wants all of the Donbas region, all of these oblasts that he has partially captured. And that would of course include retaining control over Crimea. So if you've got Ukrainian troops sitting in Kursk oblast, controlling that, that creates a real dilemma for him. For Putin, he's got to be able to walk away from whatever negotiation there is looking like the winner. Otherwise, he's going to have serious problems at home. And the new American president is going to have all the leverage in the world economically, militarily, because we haven't actually done everything that could.
This is also an opportunity for Europe to say, Mr. President, don't turn your back on Ukraine. We will fill the gap. We will step up. And I think if you look at who's probably going to be the German chancellor next year, come February, Friedrich Merz, and then you combine him with Donald Tusk of Poland and Alex Stubb of Finland and Prime Minister [Giorgia] Meloni of Italy, these are four tough, serious pro-Ukraine leaders that could in fact finally bring Europe along to the point where President Trump could be convinced that it's in America's interest that Ukraine not fail. And he could take credit for inspiring the Europeans to do it. And he would have massive leverage over the Kremlin.
And of course, what everybody is thinking about is China. The Chinese are watching to see if we have the political will to actually stand up and defend what we say is so important – sovereignty, freedom of navigation, respect for international law, those things that are under pressure out in the Indo-Pacific region as well.
Nagorski: So to wrap things up here, would you say the changing of the rules regarding these longer-range missiles is not a game changer for the war, but could change a lot of facts on the ground? Is that about right?
Gen. Hodges: I think that's a good way to say it. I don't like the “game changer” thing because there is no one weapon that would do that unless they came in gigantic, enormous quantities. But this would certainly help Ukraine improve the situation on the ground.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief.
