DEEP DIVE — The war in Ukraine has veered into volatile new territory, ignited by a final push — in Washington and Kyiv – to alter the battlefield before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
For nearly 1,000 days of war – a milestone reached last week – the pace of policy change in Washington and Brussels was deliberate. Some in Ukraine found it maddeningly glacial. And then, in short order, the White House dropped restrictions on Ukraine’s use of American ATACMS missiles against Russia, ended its opposition to giving Ukraine anti-personnel landmines, and U.S. officials said they would “surge” every penny’s worth of pledged military aid to Ukraine before the Trump team takes over.
Why the rush? Technically the U.S. said it ended the ATACMS restrictions because 10,000 North Korean troops had joined the fight on the Russian side. But the U.S. political calendar is clearly a factor. The Biden Administration believes – with good reason, given past statements by Trump and the Vice President-elect J.D. Vance – that one of two outcomes are likely after Inauguration Day: either Trump will make good on his pledge to negotiate a fast deal to end the war – a deal that would almost certainly cement Russian territorial conquests in Ukraine; or, failing to do so, the new administration will sharply curtail American financial and military aid to Ukraine.
Either outcome would run directly counter to the Biden Administration’s policy of strong support for Ukraine; hence the race-against-time moves, and the dropping of long-existing guardrails limiting Kyiv's use of U.S. weapons. Normally a lame-duck President cannot do very much; but the next two months in Ukraine may be a big exception to the rule.
“The overriding strategic role for the rest of this term…is to make Ukraine as strong as possible,” Deputy National Security adviser Jon Finer said last week at the Group of 20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro. “And that means surging as much materiel and equipment as we can get into Ukraine…during the rest of this term and this administration. We are on track to execute that.”
“A lot can happen in two months, if there's the appropriate sense of urgency in the allocation of resources,” Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former Commanding General of U.S. Army Europe, told The Cipher Brief. He also believes the changes may prove helpful to Trump in the event of a negotiation with Putin.
“I think [President Biden] actually has done a favor for the Trump administration by getting this in place,” Gen. Hodges said. “President Trump walks in, now it's a better situation for Ukraine. So it adds to the leverage Trump will have over the Kremlin.”
Russia has responded to these measures by launching a new medium-range ballistic missile against Ukraine along with a flurry of veiled nuclear threats. Many experts doubt that Putin would actually use is nuclear arsenal, given the overwhelming retaliation such a move would invite, but for now, this much is clear: the Ukraine battlefield is suddenly more dynamic than it’s been in months; and tensions between Moscow and the West have reached levels not seen since the Cold War.
The developments raise a pair of profound questions: What can be accomplished in the next eight weeks, as the rules are changed and the U.S. rushes its last-minute aid to Ukraine? And how real and dangerous are the Kremlin threats?
What a surge in aid can do
For months, U.S. officials gave two reasons for refusing Ukraine’s requests to lift the restrictions on the ATACMS missiles: the risks of a NATO-Russia escalation were too high; and the benefits would be minimal. While ATACMS are known as “long-range” weapons, their reach is 190 miles, and the Russian military was said to have moved assets beyond that range in advance of the changes.
Experts say that assessment understates the potential impact of the ATACMS. According to the Institute for the Study of War, more than 200 high-value military targets remain within that range, including supplies of Russian artillery, ammunition and rocket launchers, as well as local military headquarters located near the Ukrainian frontier.
“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,” Gen. Hodges said. “They will not have a shortage of targets.”
Gen. Hodges and others said that the strategic aims for Ukraine now will include bolstering its force in Russia’s Kursk region, and damaging Russia's ability to attack Ukrainian infrastructure from positions near the border.
Doug Lute, a former Ambassador to NATO, agreed that the loosened restrictions “could change the momentum over time, provided that we give a sufficient number of ATACMS to Ukraine.” He noted that because Russian ground logistics are largely railroad-based, these supply lines are vulnerable to attack.
“Rail resupply is vulnerable because railroads are fixed,” Lute told The Cipher Brief. “So you have switching yards, engine yards, diesel fuel depots that fuel the engines, bridges, tunnels, and so forth. All of which could be struck if you had sufficient number of long-range strike systems to do so.”
Beyond the ATACMS, there are long-range missiles provided by other NATO countries. On the day after the U.S. policy changes were made public, Ukraine hit Russia with Storm Shadow long-range missiles supplied by the U.K., whose leader, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has followed the Biden administration's lead on Ukraine. On Monday, Bloomberg reported that theU.K. had supplied Ukraine with dozens more Storm Shadow missiles.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is fast-tracking delivery of another $275 million weapons package to Ukraine that will include — for the first time — anti-personnel mines, to repel Russian ground advances in the east.
Cipher Brief expert Admiral James Stavridis said speed was essential. "In the remaining 60 days or so, put all your force behind the logistics,” Stavridis advised the Biden administration, via an interview on MSNBC. “Get as much of this kit to the battlefield, get as much support to the Commander of U.S. European Command, General Chris Cavoli. Load him up, he'll get it moving. Get as much of it in train as you can and see where the Trump administration actually lands.”
Gen. Hodges echoed the point. “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,” he told The Cipher Brief. “These are things that have already been paid for, approved, agreed. Get that out. That would be a priority in my mind.”
“The question is, is it too little too late?” Lute said. “It's very difficult to imagine that the Ukrainians have a sufficient number of ATACMS to actually make a significant battlefield difference in the next two months. I nonetheless applaud the Biden administration decision to remove this restriction.”
The Russian response: Threats, and a missile
While the White House rushes to help Ukraine, the Kremlin is responding to every move from Washington.
In the wake of the lifting of the ATACMS restrictions, Vladimir Putin altered Russia’s official nuclear doctrine, formally lowering the threshold for Russia to consider the use of nuclear weapons — specifically, against enemies supported by nuclear powers. Two days later, Russia fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile at the city of Dnipro. It’s a weapon capable of carrying a nuclear payload.
"We consider ourselves entitled to use our weapons against the military facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against our facilities," Putin said. "If anyone else doubts this, then they are wrong - there will always be a response."
Meanwhile, Russia has ratched up its regular assaults against Ukrainian infrastructure. In the past several days, Russia launched some of its largest air attacks since the start of the war, bombarding Ukraine's power grid with hundreds of missiles and drones.
Last week, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv closed for the first time since 2022, issuing a shelter-in-place advisory for American citizens in anticipation of a "potential significant air attack."
The fresh threats from the Kremlin have prompted a range of reactions from inside and outside the U.S. government. American officials have said they take Putin seriously, while reminding the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons would invite a ferocious retaliation. Multiple Cipher Brief experts point to those warnings as sufficient deterrents. They also note repeated statements from China and India that any use of the Russian nuclear arsenal would damage those countries’ relations with Moscow.
“There's always looming in the background this potential of nuclear escalation,” Lute said. “But we now have approaching three years of empirical evidence that at each stage where Putin threatened escalation, once the line was crossed, nothing extraordinary happened. Certainly we have not crossed the nuclear threshold.”
Lute checked off some potential Kremlin “red lines” – Ukraine’s sinking of the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, its attacks on strategic air bases inside Russia, the use of an array of NATO-supplied weapons against Russian forces, and the Ukrainian capture of Russian territory in Kursk province – and noted that none of those had led to an anti-NATO escalation.
“And short of crossing the nuclear line, I'm not sure what else is in Putin's arsenal,” Lute added. “He's using every conventional weapon in the inventory. So what more can he do except cross the nuclear line? And I don't believe he will do that.”
“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,” Gen. Hodges said. “But 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 lone benefit, Gen. Hodges and others say, derives from the threats themselves, which have often been enough to slow Western support for Ukraine.
The Russians “see how easily deterred we are, and that we have this excessive fear that they might actually use a nuclear weapon,” Gen. Hodges said. “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.”
Prelude to a deal?
The uptick in U.S.-Russia tensions comes at a difficult moment for both sides.
A third winter of war is already looking like it may be the worst yet for Ukrainians, given repeated Russian attacks on the power grid and other critical infrastructure. Russian forces have made territorial gains in the south, near the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. And for the first time since the February 2022 invasion, polls show a majority of Ukrainians would accept a peace deal that ceded some of their land to Russia.
At the same time, Russia is by many accounts beginning to finally feel the sting of western sanctions, and while its deployment of North Korean troops may pose an immediate problem for Ukraine, it’s also a sign of Russia’s problems in getting recruits to the frontlines. And the Kremlin is still dealing with the Ukrainian occupation of that swath of Russia’s Kursk province.
All these realities, together with the White House-Kyiv rush to change the state of the battlefield, mean that the two sides may be amenable to some sort of a peace deal.
Reuters reported this week that Putin is open to discussing a ceasefire arrangement with Trump that would freeze the current lines of control, in addition to Ukraine abandoning its goal of joining NATO. Ukrainian officials wouldn’t take that deal now; they would want some of their land back, and if not an invitation to NATO, then some very forceful security guarantees from NATO members.
But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also held out hope that Trump might convince Putin to end the bloodshed: "It will not be simple,” Zelensky said, “but yes he can, because he is much more stronger than Putin."
“The single most important reason for some optimism here is that Trump does not want to be seen as a weak figure, a patsy for Putin,” John Herbst, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, told The Cipher Brief. “And obviously if he brokers a peace deal which the Russians break, and he does nothing, or if he allows Russia to get away with rejecting his peace deal, and he does not make good as promised to arm Ukraine far beyond the way Biden armed Ukraine, then he would look weak.”
It’s an unusually dynamic period in the war, in which hopes are mingling with fears, with the strange backdrop of a lame-duck American president taking steps that may help his successor strike a deal for peace.
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