By Marc Santora and Eric Schmitt

KYIV — Ukraine’s military used American-made ballistic missiles Tuesday (19) to strike into Russia for the first time, according to senior US and Ukrainian officials, just days after President Joe Biden gave permission to do so in a major shift of US policy.

The predawn attack struck an ammunition depot in the Bryansk region of southwestern Russia, Ukrainian officials said. Russia’s Ministry of Defence said Ukraine used six ballistic missiles known as ATACMS, for Army Tactical Missile System. A senior US official and a senior Ukrainian official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations, confirmed ATACMS were used.

The strike represented a demonstration of force for Ukraine as it tries to show Western allies that providing more powerful and sophisticated weapons would pay off — by degrading Russia’s combat capabilities and relieving pressure on Ukraine’s overstretched forces.

The attack came on the same day President Vladimir Putin lowered Russia’s threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, a long-planned move whose timing appeared aimed at showing the Kremlin could respond aggressively to Ukraine using American missiles to strike Russian territory.

The Kremlin has throughout the war used the threat of deploying its nuclear arsenal to try to deter the West from providing more robust military support to Ukraine. On Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called Ukraine’s use of ATACMS in the Bryansk region “a signal that they want escalation” — a reference to the US and Western allies.

Ukrainian officials and military analysts, who have long cautioned that no single weapon will change the course of the war, noted that the impact of the shift in White House policy will depend on the quantities of missiles being supplied.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine had pleaded for months for permission to use ATACMS to strike military targets inside Russia. The Biden administration finally relented and gave its assent, a decision that was driven in part by the addition of up to 10,000 North Korean troops to Moscow’s war effort.

The authorization came just two months before the return to office of President-elect Donald Trump, who has said he will seek a quick end to the war in Ukraine.

His election has cast uncertainty over whether the US will maintain the robust military support it has provided Ukraine under Biden, or whether Trump might take a different approach on policy toward Ukraine.

On the battlefront, Russia is leveraging its advantage in air power, artillery and personnel to melt through defensive lines in southeastern Ukraine. By taking aim at logistics centres like the one targeted Tuesday, Ukraine hopes to make it more difficult to supply Russian forces engaged in relentless assaults.

The Ukrainian military’s high command, known as the General Staff, said Tuesday’s attack took place at 2:30 a.m., destroying “warehouses with ammunition” and triggering a dozen “secondary explosions.”

Andrii Kovalenko, a representative of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, said the strike in Bryansk hit warehouses housing “artillery ammunition, including North Korean ammunition for their systems, guided aerial bombs, antiaircraft missiles and ammunition for multiple-launch rocket systems.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said in a statement that it shot down five of the ATACMS and that another was damaged. It said falling fragments caused a fire at a military facility but there were no casualties.

Neither side’s claims about the impact of the strikes could be immediately independently verified.

Russia has robust and layered air defence systems, including S-400 batteries designed to counter ballistic missiles like the ATACMS. The S-400, and the newer S-500, are similar to the Western-made Patriot systems used to protect Ukrainian skies.

Since the first longer-range ATACMS arrived in Ukraine in April, Ukraine has used its limited supplies of missiles to target those Russian air defence systems in occupied areas of Ukraine — particularly in Crimea — with some success, according to satellite imagery, military analysts and Ukrainian and Western officials.

The ATACMS have also been used in successful strikes on airfields and other bases, according to satellite imagery and military analysts.

But throughout the war, the moment one side introduces a new capability, the other side works to adapt.

“Russian effectiveness against ATACMS missiles will likely increase, even if slowly, over the course of the conflict, as Russia trains air defence crews to address the threat,” Jake Mezey, a security expert, wrote in a report for The Atlantic Council in September.

The US supplied Ukraine with ATACMS for the first time in October of 2023, but the missiles were designed to hit targets only about 100 miles away. The Biden administration only provided a small number — less than two dozen in the first shipments — and the move came only after a Ukrainian counteroffensive that summer had already failed.

In April 2024, the US agreed to secretly provide ATACMS with a range of 190 miles to Ukraine. However, the Biden administration restricted their use to targeting Russian forces located in Ukrainian-occupied territory, including Crimea.

As Ukraine pressed Washington to lift those restrictions, it continued to develop its own weapons capable of hitting targets in Russia, including ballistic missiles.

The munitions depot in the Bryansk region is more than 70 miles from the Ukrainian border.

Mykhailo Samus, deputy director at the Centre for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies in Ukraine, an independent institution, said the introduction of ATACMS could have an immediate impact.

Russian command posts, military units, logistical support systems, ammunition depots, aviation bases, missile launch systems, air defence systems, radars and other key assets are all now within range of one of the most powerful weapons in the Ukrainian arsenal, he said.

“Everything depends on how many missiles Biden will give and how quickly,” he said. “If hundreds of rockets enter there, then it will be good, we’ll be able to make a few mass rocket strikes.”

Even if Ukraine is able to damage Russia’s ability to wage war, Ukraine’s forces will still be vastly outgunned and outmanned, requiring the kinds of weapons that both armies tear through at a furious rate.

Artillery ammunition has been one of Ukraine’s persistent needs throughout the war and soldiers said they are still facing shortages, compounding the challenges posed by a lack of manpower.

The European Union only recently fulfilled its goal of providing 1 million rounds to Ukraine’s war effort — eight months behind schedule.

The bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said in a statement published Monday after a recent visit to Kyiv that the EU has supplied Ukraine with more than $47.5 billion in weapons and, by the end of 2024, will have trained more than 75,000 of the country’s soldiers.

Still, he said, “We give Ukraine just enough to hold, and sometimes even less, while Russia has put its entire economy on a wartime footing and counts with the unconditional backing of North Korea and Iran.”

-New York Times

Ukrainian soldiers operate an American-made multiple launch rocket system, or MLRS, in eastern Ukraine, on March 9, 2023. Ukraine signalled a new sense of urgency on Monday (Nov. 18, 2024) following a decision by the Biden administration to allow long-range strikes inside Russia using American-provided missiles, with Ukrainian politicians suggesting that the first launches would come soon and without warning -Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times