Biden’s gift to Ukraine could help Trump as well

Dodgy optics: Why does President Biden want to strike back at Russia, or if Putin is willing to take the action against NATO?

The argument against NATO strikes is that it’s one action against which Putin has drawn a red line. The Kremlin spokesman said that the tension was going to go to a qualitatively new level. That does not mean World War III, as Donald Trump’s allies have shouted, but Russia will most likely feel compelled to retaliate against the United States and its allies in some way, probably asymmetrically and indirectly, further escalating the conflict.

The argument from the westerners is: If Russia is not constrained in battering every corner ofUkraine, why should it not be limited in its fight? The weapon in question, the Army Tactical Missile System (known as ATACMS, pronounced attack-ums), which Ukraine has already been using in Russian-occupied territory, has a relatively limited range of about 190 miles, but that would put a lot of Russian bases, ammunition storage areas and logistical hubs in range. It could be immediately useful in blunting the counteroffensive Russia is preparing to retake the chunk of territory Ukraine seized in the Kursk region. That is also where the North Koreans are supposed to be sent.

But it was arguably something he would have done in any case, given that Russia was preparing to throw 10,000 imported North Korean troops into the war and had just launched its largest air attack on Ukraine in months.

President Biden can not do anything for the Ukrainians before he leaves office, and they may be the last thing he will do for them. That makes for dodgy optics, because it saddles an incoming administration with a policy shift Biden himself long resisted because he thought it carried too great a risk of plunging America into a direct confrontation with Russia.

A U.S. official, who was not authorized to speak to reporters, confirmed to NPR that Ukraine fired U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System into Russia for the first time.

It appears that the barrage was a result of the Biden administration’s decision to allow the use of weapons that can hit inside Russia.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday if the media reports were true that Ukraine now has U.S. approval to use Western weapons to strike deep inside Russia, that would spark a “new spiral of tensions” with Washington.

The doctrine that Putin announced in September would consider a non-nuclear state to be a joint attack on Russia that could meet certain conditions for a nuclear response.

President-elect Donald Trump is about to take the oath of office in Washington in about two months, so there is an added reason for the news of potential Ukrainian strikes and updated nuclear doctrine.

In his campaign for the presidency, Trump criticized the amount of U.S. aid for Ukraine and repeatedly suggested he would seek a swift negotiated end to the war in Ukraine with Moscow.