Russia is taking Ukrainian children. Their mothers are travelling into enemy territory to save them.

Washington’s miscalculations in the Ukrainian conflict can have devastating consequences for the world.

“The language of escalation is the language of excuse.” That’s how Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, dismisses anxiety that assistance to Ukraine could provoke Russia to either expand the war to NATO countries or cross the nuclear threshold. The country most concerned about Russia expanding its aggression beyond Ukraine is the country least likely to be the victim of it: the United States.

The Biden administration has been unequivocal in its policy declarations. The president has said, repeatedly and in public, that the U.S. will provide Ukraine “whatever it takes, as long as it takes.” The president wants the political benefits of heroically assisting the good of Ukraine against the evil of Russia, but his administration’s policy is much more hesitant than its bold declarations would suggest.

I spoke to Ukrainians both in and outside of government during a recent trip to Kyiv with the Renew Democracy Initiative. Those I met were keenly aware that Ukraine relies on U.S. weapons, U.S. financial assistance, and U.S. leadership to pull together international support, and they expressed gratitude for all that the United States is doing. Most know very well that Ukraine would have lost the war without the U.S. rallying support to keep its economy from collapsing, arm its soldiers, and provide essential intelligence to protect its leaders and blunt Russian attacks. Ukrainian government officials are careful to speak only of the United States as a whole, without singling out the Biden administration or delving into U.S. domestic politics.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Biden just destroyed Ukraine’s last hope]

Yet Ukraine’s foreign and defense ministers acknowledged that “the first answer the U.S. gives to any request is no.” That was America’s answer across the past three presidential administrations: no to javelin missiles, no to stinger missiles, no to NATO membership, no to F-16s, no to weapons that can reach Russian territory, no to tanks, no to Patriot air defenses, no to HIMARs, no to ATACMs, and—until this week—again no to F-16s, even if they aren’t U.S. F-16s.  

The Biden administration has made three arguments against Ukrainian requests. The first and most condescending was, to quote the president, that “Ukraine doesn’t need F-16s now.” This came at a time when Russia’s strategy had shifted to long-range missile strikes on civilian populations and infrastructure that air dominance could better resist. Kyiv may now be well protected, but Kharkiv and other major cities continue to be at greater risk.

The Pentagon has further insisted that mastering the desired weapons systems would be prohibitively difficult and time-consuming. That argument weakened when Ukrainians, on a wartime footing, blew through the training curricula in a fraction of the time it took to train U.S. soldiers who had been in regular rotations on other systems. The Ukrainians have successfully sustained battlefield operability of an extensive array of internationally donated weapons systems.

The administration does make one argument against Ukrainian requests that should carry greater weight. Despite the president’s claims of unlimited assistance for as long as it takes, U.S. assistance isn’t endless, and Ukraine is asking for expensive items that are often in short supply. For example, having provided Ukraine with 20 HIMARs, the U.S. has only 410 remaining and 220 M270 MLRS (a tracked variant). That number may seem large, but not when you consider the intensity of fighting and the size of the U.S. forces that a war against China would entail. Nor are the costs inconsequential, even for the United States: An F-16 of the model Kyiv seeks costs about $15 million, and Ukraine wants 120 to protect its airspace. One reason the F-16 is Ukraine’s fighter of choice is that it exists in large supply in allied arsenals, not solely in the U.S. inventory.

The sweeping declaration that Washington will give Ukraine what it needs for as long as it takes is part of a pattern of presidential rhetorical largesse. It’s of a piece with committing U.S. troops to fight for Taiwan without providing the military budget to produce a war-winning military for that fight, or designing a national-security strategy that commits to allied solidarity while producing exclusionary economic policies that allies resent.

The escalation concern that looms largest for the Biden administration in Ukraine, understandably, is Russian nuclear use. Ukrainians remain admirably stalwart about this prospect, suggesting that a nuclear battlefield strike would not serve Russian objectives. To be more concerned about nuclear use than the likely victims of it are—or to push Ukraine toward untenable outcomes in the name of avoiding that risk—is to actually encourage nuclear threats. The United States can strengthen deterrence instead by publicly committing that if we see any sign that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon, we’ll share the intelligence widely and provide Ukraine with weapons to preempt the attack. We can put Russia on notice that if it uses a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, we will send NATO radiological teams—NATO forces—there to assist Ukraine’s recovery, and we will ensure that any Russian involved in the decision or its execution ends up dead or in the Hague.

[Eric Schlosser: The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory]

The true cost of the Biden administration’s focus on escalation may be one of prolonging the war. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has assessed that F-16s are “a decision that could have been made six months ago. Truth is, if they had begun training pilots on F-16s six months ago, then those pilots would be able to get into those airplanes this spring.” Our hesitance telegraphs to Russia that by continuing to assault Ukraine, it can wait us out—a lesson consistent with the course of the U.S. withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the leader of the free world to be more worried than the leaders of Poland, Denmark, France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom is not a great look. Those countries are already considering offering fighters or training to Ukraine—and are at greater risk of Russian retaliation than the United States is.

Overnight missile attack comes a day after Russia unleashed its largest ever drone assault on the Ukrainian capital.

The Ukrainian president thanks his air force, after most of the Russian drones were shot down.

For months, the West has fretted over the prospect of paying for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Russia’s war has inflicted an estimated $400 billion in rebuilding costs, a tally that rises every day. Western leaders, already alarmed by inflation and the threat of recession, have understandably blanched over the bill.

But many of them are disregarding a solution that would cover most of Ukraine’s costs and help deter future aggression not only from Russia but from dictatorships around the world. A year ago, Western governments froze some $300 billion in state assets from Russia’s central bank. Now they could seize the funds and give them to Ukraine.

The biggest question is whether this would be legal. As critics have noted, a seizure of this magnitude has never been attempted. Moreover, little precedent exists for the United States to confiscate the assets of a nation with whom (despite the Kremlin’s claims to the contrary) it isn’t at war.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

But Russia has unleashed a kind of rank imperialism the world has rarely seen since the Cold War, committing war crimes and—as manifold evidence suggests—genocide, all against a harmless neighbor. Because of its unjustifiable aggression and atrocities, Moscow has forfeited any moral right to funds stashed abroad.

The reasons to seize them are legion. Confiscating the Russian funds—which are spread across various Western economies—would serve a crucial role in ending the fighting, beating back Russian imperialism, and ensuring a viable economic future for Ukraine. And it would send a clear threat to regimes that might otherwise be willing to breach international law and destabilize continents for their own gain, as Moscow has.

Seizing these assets would also help fix an overlooked issue facing Ukraine: investor hesitancy. Investors remain wary of bankrolling projects that could be targeted by Russian drones and artillery. But the frozen funds could cover nearly 75 percent of Ukraine’s costs and significantly reduce the burden on potential financiers, making the country a more appealing investment destination.

In the U.S., much of the legal debate has focused on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that defines the president’s abilities to regulate international commerce during national emergencies. Although the IEEPA has historically been used to authorize more conventional sanctions—including in Iran, the Central African Republic, and China—some scholars have argued that it could also be used to seize the tens of billions of dollars in Russian assets currently in U.S. reserves.

That proposal has generated legal pushback, although advocates are undeterred. The nonprofit Renew Democracy Initiative told me that it plans to examine the “legal foundations for seizing frozen Russian assets and transferring them to Ukraine” and expects to publish its findings in the coming months. (The initiative is chaired by Garry Kasparov, who also chairs the Human Rights Foundation, where I direct a program on combating kleptocracy.)

Even if U.S. law offered clear justification, though, it couldn’t be used to touch any of Russia’s assets frozen in Europe, which are far more valuable than those in the U.S. Fortunately, international law appears to offer such justification.

As Philip Zelikow and Simon Johnson wrote in Foreign Affairs last year, Russia’s obvious culpability for the war entitles Ukraine to claim compensation from Russia. Because “the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a wrongful, unprovoked war of aggression that violates the United Nations Charter,” Zelikow and Johnson argue, any state (not just Ukraine) can “invoke Russia’s responsibility to compensate Ukraine, and they can take countermeasures against Moscow—including transferring its frozen foreign assets to ensure Ukraine gets paid.”

Despite many policy makers’ impression that Russian assets are untouchable, Anton Moiseienko, an international-law expert at the Australian National University, recently showed that they aren’t immune from seizure. “To extend protection from any governmental interferences to central bank assets would equate to affording them inviolability,” Moiseienko wrote, which is reserved only for property belonging to foreign diplomatic missions. The protection afforded central-bank assets “is not as absolute as is often thought.”

That is, in the eyes of international law, Russian assets aren’t inviolate. In fact, the only real remaining obstacles to seizing them are debates surrounding domestic laws and domestic politics. As Moiseienko wrote, “Political and economic circumspection, rather than legal constraints, are the last defense against [the assets’] confiscation.”

This is particularly true in the U.S., where plenty of hesitancy remains even after more than a year of war. As The New York Times reported in March, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen believes that seizing Russian assets could reduce faith in the American economy and the U.S. dollar. Other critics think it would threaten U.S. assets and investments in other countries.

[Eliot A. Cohen: It’s not enough for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.]

These points all have a certain merit. And so, too, do concerns about such a move prompting the Kremlin to escalate. In all likelihood, though, Putin’s regime has already written off these funds, not least because they’ll almost certainly never be returned while he’s in power. Moreover, seizing them is hardly as escalatory as, say, the West sending Ukraine F-16s or long-range precision rockets.

But at a broader level, these criticisms misunderstand the significance of the war and what it may lead to.

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is an assault on the geopolitical order. A nuclear power launched a militarized annexation, entirely unprovoked, against a neighbor that had long ago given up its arsenal. In the months following the invasion, the Kremlin has been accused of torture, beheadings, and manifold crimes against humanity. And it has been responsible for more bloodshed than any conflict in Europe has exacted since World War II. It is led by a dictator wanted for arrest by the International Criminal Court, and who is driven solely by a deranged, messianic imperialism. And it is setting a precedent for other autocrats, who are eager to see whether Putin’s revanchism will work—and eager to emulate any success he finds, especially if his crimes go unpunished.

If this war doesn’t justify seizing a nation’s assets, I’m not sure what would. Repairing the damage it has caused is well worth the risks that have occupied Washington.

Some Western leaders still hold out hope for a negotiated peace and argue that we should keep Russia’s assets frozen to be used later as a bargaining chip. But Putin cannot be negotiated with. And given the alternative—that these funds remain frozen in perpetuity as Russian munitions continue demolishing Ukrainian cities—the argument against seizing these assets gets weaker by the day.

The unprecedented nature of Putin’s crimes, the allowances of international law, and Ukraine’s growing need all point in one, clear direction. Russia’s frozen assets are not spoils of war; they are rightfully Ukraine’s. It’s time for the Biden administration and the rest of the West to put them to use.

A blunt statement, accompanied by a slickly produced video of Ukrainian troops preparing for battle, appeared designed to rally the nation and to spread anxiety ...

Ukrainian defence minister says Russian attacks have decreased as Moscow troops are being 'replaced and regrouped'.

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The dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has signed an agreement with Russia to base Russian nuclear weapons in his country. The strategic impact of such a move is negligible, but a lot can go wrong with this foolish plan.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The play that explains Succession (and everything else) The Russian red line Washington won’t cross—yet. COVID shots are still one giant experiment. AI is unlocking the human brain’s secrets. A Tense Summer

Russia has taken another step toward nuclearizing its satrapy in neighboring Belarus. This is bad news but not a crisis (yet). But first, I want to add a note to what I wrote a few weeks ago about the drone attack on the Kremlin.

I suggested that the weird strike on a Kremlin building was unlikely to be an act sanctioned or carried out by the Ukrainian government. My best guess at the time was that the Russians might be pulling some kind of false-flag stunt to justify more repression and violence against Ukraine as well as internal dissent in Russia. I didn’t think the Ukrainians would attack an empty building in the middle of the night.
The U.S. intelligence community, however, now thinks the strike could have been some kind of Ukrainian special operation. Those same American analysts, according to The New York Times, are not exactly sure who authorized action against the Russian capital:

U.S. intelligence agencies do not know which unit carried out the attack and it was unclear whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top officials were aware of the operation, though some officials believe Mr. Zelensky was not.

That’s not much to go on, especially because the intelligence community’s confidence in this view is “low,” meaning there is at least some general, but not specific, evidence for it. The Americans suggest the attack may have been “orchestrated” by the Ukrainian security services, but that could mean any number of possibilities, including civilians, a small militia, a few people loosely affiliated with the Ukrainians, or even a commando team.

The best evidence, however, that this was not a false flag is that with the exception of firing a wave of missiles, the Russian government has said and done almost nothing in response either in Ukraine or in Russia. If Vladimir Putin’s security forces had engineered the incident, they’d almost certainly be taking advantage of it, but they’re not. Instead, the Kremlin seems paralyzed and has clamped down on any further reporting about the whole business; if the Ukrainian goal was to rattle Russian leaders, mission accomplished. So my theory has gone up in smoke—a hazard of trying to piece together an explanation while waiting for better evidence—but I thought it important to update you here.

Now, about those Belarus nukes.

Putin announced back in March that he intended to station nuclear arms in Belarus, a move that had Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko doing a bit of uneasy throat-clearing as he tried to stay in Putin’s good graces while being understandably nervous about hosting weapons of mass destruction in his fiefdom. The hesitation is over: Belarusian Defense Minister Victor Khrenin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu yesterday signed a formal agreement allowing the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus.

This would be the first time post-Soviet Russia has stationed nuclear weapons outside its own territory, but the bombs aren’t in Belarus yet. Lukashenko was in Moscow yesterday to attend a summit of the Eurasian Economic Forum, and although he claimed that the complicated process of relocating Russian nuclear bombs has already begun, I don’t believe him. (There I go again, theorizing in the absence of evidence. But Western intelligence agencies watch the movement of Russian nuclear weapons pretty closely, and so far, none of them has indicated that they see anything happening.) Besides, Lukashenko’s assertion wasn’t exactly definitive; when asked in Moscow if the weapons had already arrived, he said, “Maybe. I will go and take a look.”

Now, without getting too far over my skis, I will say that the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons in their territory know without exception whether they have them or not, and don’t need to “go and take a look.” Lukashenko’s flip comment suggests to me that he knows that nothing has been moved yet, and that he understands that his role in this dangerous sideshow is to play along with the Kremlin’s attempt to jangle Western nerves about nuclear war.

Putin, for his part, has said that storage facilities for Russian nuclear arms will be complete by July 1. Nuclear weapons, of course, require highly secure military installations and personnel trained in dealing with such systems, such as how to load them onto their delivery vehicles, and the unique safety precautions that surround them. Even in the best of times, nuclear weapons are a high-maintenance proposition, and accidents do happen: In 2007, an American B-52 flew across the United States with six nuclear bombs that the crew didn’t realize were mounted on the wings.

It’s also possible that Putin is squeezing political impact of a nuclear agreement while he still can, given recent questions about Lukashenko’s health. The Belarus strongman has looked weak lately. It would be very much Putin’s gangland style to make sure he gets Belarus as a stage for his nuclear threats as soon as possible, if he thinks the grim reaper is about to step in.

Putin’s July deadline is also important because it means the Russians will be moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what looks to be a summer of intense fighting. Such a timetable is probably intentional. The Kremlin boss believes that the West is deeply afraid of nuclear war, and he intends to play on that fear. Western leaders, of course, are deeply afraid of nuclear war, because they are not utter psychopaths. Putin and his generals, although brutal and vicious men, are afraid of it, too, no matter what they might say, because they are not suicidal. (So were Soviet leaders and their generals, as we learned after the Cold War.)

What Putin fails to understand, however, is that years of struggling with the Soviet Union taught the United States and its allies how to contend with an aggressive Kremlin and the dangers of escalation at the same time. Putin, as I often note, is a Soviet nostalgist who longs for the old Soviet empire and who still seems to believe that a weak and decadent West will not continue to oppose him.

As ever, I worry not about Putin’s deliberate move to start World War III, but about some kind of error or accident when transferring nuclear weapons from one paranoid authoritarian country to another. Putin may well place nuclear weapons close to Ukraine and then claim that NATO is threatening Russia’s nuclear deterrent, thus provoking a crisis he thinks will induce the West to back away from supporting Kyiv. This would be yet another harebrained blunder in a series of poor moves, but Putin, as we know, is not exactly a master strategist. It’s going to be a tense summer.

Related:

“Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin.” The irreversible change in Belarus Today’s News A South Carolina circuit-court judge has temporarily blocked the state’s six-week abortion ban, one day after Governor Henry McMaster signed it into law. A House committee led by Texas Republicans recommended the impeachment of State Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday, citing years of alleged lawbreaking and misconduct. The Mississippi police officer who shot Aderrien Murry, an unarmed 11-year-old Black boy, has been suspended with pay as the shooting is investigated. Dispatches Work in Progress: The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham, James Surowiecki writes.

The Books Briefing: Books editor Gal Beckerman breaks down what you should be reading this summer—just in time for the season’s unofficial start.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Carlos Lopez-Calleja / Disney

A Chinese American Show That Doesn’t Bother to Explain Itself

By Shirley Li

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable. We have this taped to the wall because it’s the Chinese character for fortune! These hard-boiled eggs are brown because they’ve been soaked in tea! In an attempt to prove that my surroundings were perfectly normal, I turned myself into a tour guide, and my own home into a sideshow.

American Born Chinese doesn’t bother with such disclaimers. The Disney+ show, now streaming, is exuberant and unabashed about its hyper-specific focus on the Chinese American experience.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Jennifer Egan: Martin Amis taught me how to be funny.

How America can avoid the next debt-ceiling showdown

Ozempic in teens is a mess.

Culture Break Kailey Schwerman / Showtime

Watch. Yellowjackets’ Season 2 finale (streaming on Showtime) made a terrible mistake.

Listen. To the first episode of the newly launched Radio Atlantic podcast with host Hanna Rosin, on whether the war in Ukraine can recapture the world’s attention at a crucial moment.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This is my last Daily for the next week or so, as I am headed off for some sunshine and downtime, but senior editor Isabel Fattal and our colleagues at The Atlantic will keep things as lively here as ever. (This newsletter will be off on Monday for Memorial Day, so look for the next edition on Tuesday.)

With vacation on my mind, I want to recommend a gem of a movie about Las Vegas that has lived in the shadow of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (an undeniable masterpiece) for too long. Twenty years ago, William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin starred in The Cooler, one of the bleakest movies about Sin City since Leaving Las Vegas. Macy plays a “cooler,” a guy whose bad luck is so contagious that the casinos hire him to stand near people who win too much money at the tables.

It’s a love story and a crime story, but it’s also about old Vegas becoming a new (and sillier) Vegas. Back then, developers were making an inane attempt to transform an industry mostly devoted to gambling, booze, and sex into a theme park for families. Alec Baldwin—who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor—rails against it all in a rant about the Strip circa 2002: “You mean that Disneyland mook fest out there? Huh? That’s a fucking violation is what that is. Something that used to be beautiful, used to have class, like a gorgeous high-priced hooker with an exclusive clientele … It makes me want to cry, because I remember the way she used to be.”

I cheer him on every time. See you in a few weeks.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Two months before invading Ukraine, Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on its neighbor’s border and sent NATO a bill of demands. Moscow’s list—structured as a treaty—required that the alliance close itself off to new members. It declared that NATO states “shall not conduct any military activity on the territory of Ukraine as well as other States” in Eastern Europe. It insisted that NATO remove all its forces from the 14 countries that joined after the Soviet Union collapsed. And it asserted that the alliance “shall not deploy land-based” missiles in areas “allowing them to reach the territory” of Russia.

Moscow suggested that the treaty was a pathway for lowering tensions with the West. Yet according to U.S. intelligence officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin had decided to invade Ukraine months earlier. In reality, the treaty was just a diplomatic pretext for the war: a laundry list of things that Putin hated about NATO, wanted changed, and would kill Ukrainians to protest.

But if Putin thought that invading Russia’s neighbor would get the West to accede to his demands, he was wildly mistaken. Rather than pulling troops from its east, NATO responded to Russia’s aggression by deploying more soldiers in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. The alliance did not close its doors; instead, it expanded, adding Finland this April, with Sweden possibly close behind. Ukraine is not part of NATO, but the invasion has pushed the United States and Europe to send remarkable amounts of military assistance to Kyiv, including rockets, tanks, and Soviet-era fighter jets. Most recently, Washington signaled that it will let Europe provide Ukraine with U.S.-made F-16s. The West has effectively flouted all of the draft treaty’s demands.

And yet there’s one line Washington hasn’t crossed. Despite repeated pleas, the United States has not given Kyiv land-based missiles capable of hitting Russia.

“We’re not going to send to Ukraine rocket systems that strike into Russia,” U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters in September. He hasn’t budged since.

Brynn Tannehill: What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine

To many analysts, Biden’s decision—and implicit reasoning—is perceptive. Sustained Ukrainian attacks inside Russia’s territory could violate Putin’s red lines in a way that previous strikes haven’t. So could repeatedly hitting Crimea, the peninsula that the Kremlin illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014. “It’s Crimea and Russian territory,” Austin Carson, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago who studies escalation, told me. “I would worry about crossing one of those bedrock limits.”

But to Ukrainians, these concerns are detached from reality. Kyiv has made isolated attacks on Crimea and Russia before, none of which has widened the conflict. In fact, none of Moscow’s wartime escalations has touched NATO land. And the United Kingdom has already given Kyiv some missiles, fired from planes, that can reach into Russia. France may do so as well. Britain’s provision did not prompt the Kremlin to go berserk.

“People are quite confused,” the former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk told me when I asked what Ukrainians thought about Washington’s reticence. “They just don’t understand.”

They are also tremendously frustrated, because Kyiv may need long-range U.S. missiles to win the conflict. “It’s just impossible to be on the battlefield and continuing to fight with the weapons that Ukraine already has,” Polina Beliakova, a Ukrainian political scientist at Dartmouth College who studies civil-military relations, told me. Ukrainian soldiers, she said, are performing admirably. But without superior weapons, even the most motivated military will struggle to defeat a much larger enemy. To liberate more provinces, Ukrainians could have to strike hard, far, and again and again. Washington will have to decide just how much it is prepared to help them.

The United States Army Tactical Missile System is a formidable weapon. Developed in the late Cold War and first used in Operation Desert Storm, ATACMS are launched straight out of the back of vehicles that Washington has already given to Kyiv. (Washington, afraid of escalation, modified the vehicles it sent so that Ukraine couldn’t use them to fire long-range missiles.) Once airborne, the missiles can reach more than three times the speed of sound, making them very difficult to intercept. They can travel up to 186 miles.

These specifications give ATACMS—pronounced “attack-ems”—certain advantages over Britain’s missiles. The latter weapons, although very powerful in their own right, do not move as fast or go quite the same distance as ATACMS. They must be fired out of fighter jets, and Ukraine’s fleet is overtaxed. The radars on Ukrainian jets are also not as powerful as the ones on many Western aircraft, making it tricky for the crew to accurately target each missile. Britain’s provision will become more useful if Kyiv receives F-16s, but Ukrainians won’t be able to fly the U.S. jets for at least several months. And by then, Kyiv may not have many of the missiles left.

“There is no analogue for ATACMS,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “There is no alternative.”

Zagorodnyuk said that, if received, ATACMS could give Ukraine major advantages. For starters, the missiles would make it much easier for Kyiv to hit most of Russia’s command posts and wartime weapons depots, which typically lie beyond the front lines but within 186 miles. ATACMS would also help the Ukrainian military sever the so-called land bridge to Crimea: the thin strip of occupied territory that connects Russia with the peninsula’s isthmus. Similarly, the missiles could hit the bridge that directly links Crimea with Russia. Together, these attacks would substantially weaken Moscow’s forces in southern Ukraine, helping with Kyiv’s counteroffensive. They could even pave the way for Ukraine to take back the peninsula, which is widely considered Kyiv’s hardest military target.

For Ukrainians, taking Crimea may be essential to ending the war and protecting their country, especially given that the peninsula is now a giant staging ground for Russia’s forces. But for Washington, a campaign to take Crimea would be deeply unsettling. Putin views Crimea as perhaps his most prized asset. After Russia seized it in 2014, his approval ratings soared to record highs. The Biden administration has publicly said that Ukraine has the right to liberate all of its occupied territory, Crimea included, yet senior U.S. officials have repeatedly insinuated that going after the peninsula would be too dangerous. In February, for example, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told experts that an operation for Crimea would be a “red line” for the Kremlin.

In theory, the United States could provide ATACMS on the condition that Ukraine not use them to hit the peninsula. But Kyiv is unlikely to accept such an arrangement. “That would set a massive precedent of treating Crimea as a special case, and that’s exactly what the Russians want,” Zagorodnyuk told me. Ukraine could even be tempted to use the missiles to strike Russia proper. According to The Washington Post, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky privately proposed attacking Russian villages in order to gain leverage over the Kremlin. And on Monday, pro-Ukrainian militias launched an assault across Russia’s border. They appear to have used U.S.-made vehicles in their incursion.

Publicly, Kyiv has assured Washington that it will not hit Russia with U.S. rockets. But no matter the conditions, guaranteeing that the missiles would not cross one of Moscow’s trip wires is impossible.

“The risk is that you think you’re okay and then you hit that red line and then things escalate really fast out of control,” Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. In the worst-case scenario, that spiral could lead to Russia using nuclear weapons. But Kavanagh pointed out that Moscow could escalate in many ways without going nuclear. It could, for instance, carpet-bomb Ukrainian cities. It could also launch cyberattacks on NATO states.

From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive

The odds of Russia attacking NATO, digitally or otherwise, might seem long. But they are not outlandish, especially considering Moscow’s perspective. “Russia doesn’t see itself fighting Ukraine,” Margarita Konaev, the deputy director of analysis at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told me. “It sees itself fighting NATO.”

The Kremlin’s reasoning, she explained, makes some sense. Moscow is battling against NATO weapons systems. Its troops are being hit with NATO members’ ammunition. Ukraine is operating based off U.S. intelligence. “The only thing they’re not fighting are NATO troops on the ground,” Konaev said. If Ukraine begins regularly shelling Crimea or Russian territory with U.S.-made weapons, Russia could respond as if NATO was attacking the homeland.

Almost no one knows exactly how many soldiers Ukraine has lost fighting against Russia. But the number is large. According to the classified documents leaked on Discord last month, the U.S. government estimates that Ukraine has suffered somewhere from 124,500 to 131,000 casualties. The figure is lower than Russia’s estimated 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, but Ukraine’s population is about a third the size of its adversary’s. If the war turns into a pure battle of attrition, Kyiv will struggle to hold out.

It’s not surprising, then, that Ukrainians have little patience for Washington’s escalation concerns.

“Not providing better weapons would basically throw Ukraine under the bus in slow motion,” said Beliakova. She described the frustration of sitting through meetings where Western policy makers theorized about what a long war would look like, and how they can help sustain Kyiv. “They go, ‘Oh, well the West can easily supplement this, supplement that, provide this, provide that,’” Beliakova said. “I’m like, ‘Ukraine will run out of people!’” The country, she told me, needs more long-range weapons if it is going to overcome Russia’s enormous demographic advantage.

Some analysts went even further, wondering if Washington’s reluctance was designed to stop Ukraine from winning. “If you’ve noticed, the [Department of Defense], the White House, they never talk about victory,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “They’re still talking about an unknown ending to this story. And so the political goal of the Western coalition is unclear.”

Giving long-range missiles to Kyiv, he said, would help eliminate the ambiguity. Doing so would be a boost to Ukrainian morale—one that might be needed if the forthcoming counteroffensive does not succeed. Providing ATACMS would also signal to the rest of the Western alliance that the United States supports going to the max to help Kyiv, possibly easing hesitations in European capitals about supplying other Ukrainian needs.

Ukrainians do not think that Russia would escalate if the United States sent long-range missiles. “I don’t believe the escalation story,” Zagorodnyuk told me. “There have been tons of other weapons supplied for tens of billions of dollars. ATACMS is not going to make a big difference.” Even if it did prompt Russian anger, Ukrainians are unsure as to why NATO should care. Moscow has escalated in the past: it responded to Kyiv’s astonishingly successful counteroffensive in Kharkiv by mobilizing 300,000 new troops, and it began indiscriminately bombing Ukrainian cities after an explosion damaged the Crimean-Russian bridge. But these steps hurt Ukrainians, not NATO members. Unless Russia uses a nuclear weapon, breaking a nearly 78-year taboo and endangering the entire planet, the West is unlikely to directly enter the conflict because of Russia’s atrocities. And so long as they believe they can win, Ukrainians appear prepared to endure a whole lot.

The country’s hawks have grown pessimistic about getting the missiles. Yes, they said, Washington and its allies have changed their mind in the past. But with tanks and F-16s, Western claims were as much about technical concerns as they were about the security risks. These weapons, policy makers argued, would take too much time and energy for Ukrainians to receive and learn how to use. There are technical risks with ATACMS too: Many American experts worry about depleting the United States’ limited supply, or that Russia could capture a missile, copy its design, and send China a mock-up.

Still, such hurdles can be overcome. Ukraine’s battlefield performance, and its success in Western training programs, helped convince NATO states that the country could handle more sophisticated weapons. If Ukrainians use Britain’s long-range missiles successfully, and in ways the U.S. approves of, Kyiv could convince Washington that it should get ATACMS as well.

But not if Washington is too afraid of how Russia will respond.

“With ATACMS, I don’t see these coming,” Zagorodnyuk said. Then he paused. “Yet.”