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ENB Pub Note: Any use of long-range weapons by NATO is bad, wrong, and should not be authorized. There is way too much at stake, and the United States does not need to be in NATO.
The outgoing head of NATO Jens Stoltenberg said on Monday (16 September) he welcomed talks on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory, but any decision on the issue would have to be made by individual allies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been pleading with allies for months to let Ukraine fire Western missiles including long-range US ATACMS and British Storm Shadows deep into Russia to limit Moscow’s ability to launch attacks.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Joe Biden held talks in Washington on Friday on whether to allow Kyiv to use the long-range missiles against targets in Russia. No decision was announced.
UK and US divided
Reportdely Starmer is in favour of authorising Ukraine to use long-range weapons, while for Biden, the decision raises questions about whether authorising such strikes might risk a direct war between NATO and Russia.
“I welcome these developments and these decisions but its for individual allies to make the final decisions,” Stoltenberg told LBC radio. “Allies have different policies on this.”
Some US officials are deeply sceptical that allowing the use of such missiles would make a significant difference in Kyiv’s battle against Russian invaders.
President Vladimir Putin has said the West would be directly fighting Russia if it allowed Ukraine to strike with Western-made long-range missiles.
Asked about possible Russian retaliation, Stoltenberg said there were “no risk-free options in the war”.
“But I continue to believe that the biggest risk for us, for United Kingdom, for NATO, will be if President Putin wins in Ukraine,” he added.
Russia’s option
Putin’s options to retaliate if the West lets Ukraine use its long-range missiles to strike Russia could include striking British military assets near Russia or, in extremis, conducting a nuclear test to show intent, analysts have said.
Ulrich Kuehn, an arms expert at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg, said he did not rule out Putin choosing to send some kind of nuclear message – for example testing a nuclear weapon in an effort to cow the West.
“This would be a dramatic escalation of the conflict,” he said in an interview. “Because the point is, what kind of arrows has Mr Putin then left to shoot if the West then still continues, apart from actual nuclear use?”
Russia has not conducted a nuclear weapons test since 1990, the year before the fall of the Soviet Union, and a nuclear explosion would signal the start of a more dangerous era, Kuehn said, cautioning that Putin may feel he is seen as weak in his responses to increasing NATO support for Ukraine.
Gerhard Mangott, a security specialist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, said in an interview he also thought it was possible, though in his view not likely, that Russia’s response could include some form of nuclear signal.
“The Russians could conduct a nuclear test. They have made all the preparations needed. They could explode a tactical nuclear weapon somewhere in the east of the country just to demonstrate that (they) mean it when they say we will eventually resort to nuclear weapons.”
British blowback
In the case of Britain, Moscow was likely to declare that London had gone from a hybrid proxy war with Russia to direct armed aggression if it allows Kyiv to fire Storm Shadow missiles at Russia, former Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov said on social media platform Telegram on Friday.
Russia was likely to close the British embassy in Moscow and its own in London, strike British drones and warplanes close to Russia, for example over the Black Sea, and possibly fire missiles at F-16 warplanes that carry the Storm Shadows at their bases in Romania and Poland, Markov predicted.
(Edited by Georgi Gotev)
Read more with Euractiv
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