MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin warned that allowing Ukraine to use Western-made long-range missiles against Russian territory would mean direct involvement of the West in the conflict. He argued that such a development would significantly alter the nature and scope of the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been urging Kyiv’s allies to provide long-range missiles, such as the US ATACMS and British Storm Shadows, to strike deep into Russian territory and reduce Moscow’s capacity to launch attacks. Putin, however, claimed that supplying these missiles would involve NATO directly, as the targeting data and missile programming would require NATO military expertise that Ukraine lacks.
“This decision goes beyond just whether the Ukrainian regime can use these weapons against Russia. It involves determining if NATO countries are directly engaged in the conflict,” Putin said in an interview with Russian state TV. He suggested that such a move would represent a direct participation of NATO countries, including the US and European nations, in the war, fundamentally changing its nature.
Putin did not specify what actions Russia might take in response but mentioned in the past the possibility of supplying Russian weapons to adversaries of the West to strike Western targets. He has also discussed the potential deployment of conventional missiles capable of reaching the US and European allies.
As Russia, the world’s largest nuclear power, revises its nuclear doctrine, there is growing pressure on Putin to explicitly state Russia’s willingness to use nuclear weapons against countries supporting NATO’s actions in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia is conducting major naval exercises with China and considering restrictions on key commodity exports.
The West is debating whether to permit Kyiv to use these long-range weapons in response to what it sees as Russian escalation, including allegations that Russia has received ballistic missiles from Iran, which Tehran has denied as “ugly propaganda.”
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which marked the most significant confrontation between Russia and the West since the Cold War, the conflict has seen Russia occupying over 18% of Ukrainian territory. Putin portrays the invasion as a struggle against a decaying West that, in his view, has encroached on Russia’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine, since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The West and Ukraine view the invasion as an aggressive land grab and remain committed to defeating Russia on the battlefield.
