Ukraine’s ATACMS: What Will the U.S. Missiles Mean for the War?

With little more than two months left in office, President Joe Biden has belatedly heeded Ukraine’s pleas and reportedly allowed the use of American-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) inside Russia. This comes a little more than a week after another post-election decision to allow a small number of U.S. defense contractors to fix U.S.-made weapons systems inside Ukraine, rather than forcing Ukrainians to take their weapons to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries for repair. All of this calls to mind the anonymous quip—often wrongly attributed to former United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill—that Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, but only after exhausting all the other options.

This has, in fact, virtually been the credo of the Biden administration when it comes to Ukraine. Biden has given Ukrainians access to almost all the weapons they have asked for—including Abrams heavy tanks, Bradley armored fighting vehicles, Patriot air-defense batteries, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), and, most recently, F-16 fighter jets—but only after agonizing and drawn-out deliberations during which Ukraine has paid a substantial price in land and lives for not having had the weapons systems earlier.

This caution made sense in the early stage of the war, which began with Russia’s unprovoked invasion on February 24, 2022, when there were legitimate fears that Russian President Vladimir Putin could use nuclear weapons to make up for the battlefield reverses suffered by his conventional forces. But that danger point passed in the fall of 2022 when Putin did not go nuclear despite suffering substantial defeats in the Kharkiv and Kherson provinces. Since then, Ukraine has crossed one supposed Russian red line after another—including repeatedly deploying drones to bomb Moscow and sending Ukrainian ground forces to occupy part of Russia’s Kursk province in August 2024. Yet Biden has still proceeded with extreme caution, which has forced Ukraine to fight a grinding war of attrition against a much larger country.

Ukraine now finds itself on the defensive and losing ground in the eastern Donbas region at the fastest rate since 2022. Russian troops are inching toward the key city of Pokrovsk, a major logistics and transportation hub that anchors the Ukrainian defense of the east, albeit at staggering cost. The United Kingdom chief of defense staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, recently said that October was the costliest month for Russian forces of the entire war, with Russia losing an average of 1,500 soldiers killed or wounded every single day. Overall, Radakin estimated that Russia has lost 700,000 killed or wounded since the start of the fighting.

But Russia has ramped up recruiting to keep up with its losses, and now its forces have been augmented by 10,000 North Korean troops as part of an offensive meant to drive the Ukrainians from the Russian Kursk region. It is the involvement of the North Koreans that evidently prompted Biden to reconsider his prohibition on Ukraine using ATACMS against targets inside Russia. Biden had already allowed the Ukrainians to deploy HIMARS, with a range of fifty miles, inside Russia to defend Kharkiv. ATACMS, with a range of 190 miles, will allow the Ukrainians to strike even deeper against military targets inside Russia. It is possible that, following the U.S. decision, Britain and France could allow Ukraine to similarly utilize their SCALP/Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which have a range of about 155 miles, although no decision has been reached yet in Paris and London.

Some U.S. Defense Department officials argued against the ATACMS decision on the grounds that Russia had already moved many of its aircraft out of their range and that the Ukrainians did not have enough ATACMS to change the course of the war. (Some estimates put the total number possessed by Kyiv at less than fifty.) But the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, has identified hundreds of significant Russian military targets within 190 miles of the border with Ukraine. These now reportedly include the bases where North Korean troops have been preparing for their attacks on Ukrainian positions.

The Biden administration sees a need to inflict heavy losses on the North Korean troops to dissuade North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un from sending more of his troops to fight for Russia. Bloomberg has reported that Pyongyang could send around 100,000 more troops. Even that larger amount would only make up for less than three months of Russian combat losses, but the North Korean troop contributions can reduce the pressure on Putin to stage unpopular, involuntary call-ups of Russian reservists.

Unfortunately, time could be running out for U.S. aid to Ukraine. President-Elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20. He has pledged to end the war within a day, without spelling out how he could accomplish this feat. Many in Trump’s camp appear eager to cut off aid to Ukraine. But doing so would make likely a Russian victory that would be a major strategic setback for the United States and an embarrassment to Trump. If Trump is serious about bringing about an equitable end to the war, then Biden’s decision to extend ATACMS authority can help increase the pressure on Putin to negotiate.