Ukraine launched a surprise attack into Russia in part to establish a “buffer zone” that would make it more difficult for Russian forces to target important Ukrainian border cities, according to officials.
“The Ukrainian Armed Forces only targets military infrastructure,” Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi said Tuesday. “The purpose of the operation is to save the lives of our people and protect the territory of Ukraine from Russian attacks.”
Such explanations, after days of silence about the purpose of the audacious operation, struck some observers as an inversion of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetorical justifications for the occupation of Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian officials, however, signaled that the risky maneuver would not have been necessary if President Joe Biden had not banned Ukrainian forces from firing American-made long-range missiles, known as ATACMS, at key Russian bases in Russia.
“Unfortunately, Ukraine does not have sufficient capabilities to carry out long-range strikes with the weapons it has to defend itself against this terror,” he said. “We do not yet have the solutions we insist on. Therefore, there is a need to use the Ukrainian Armed Forces to liberate these border areas from Russian military contingents that are striking Ukraine.”
Biden has restricted the use of U.S. weapons to attack long-range targets in Russia due to a misgiving that such operations could provoke Putin to escalate or widen the war. Ukrainian officials, on the other hand, hope that their foray into Russia will show that such fears are overblown.
“It has destroyed the myth of escalation, and it created an additional argument to lift this ban on the use of American missiles in the territory of Russia,” Oleksandr Merezhko, Ukrainian foreign affairs chairman, told the Washington Examiner. “This operation, it gives us more arguments and increases the chances that we will finally be allowed to use ATACMS against Russia in its territory.”
Ukrainian forces poured over the Russian border last week, catching Russian officials and Western observers off guard with an invasion that puts new pressure on the Kremlin but runs the risk of weakening Ukrainian defenses on the front lines of eastern Ukraine. That attack is creating a “buffer zone,” Merezhko said, to guard Sumy, a border city in a region where civilians have had to evacuate in recent weeks due to Russian attacks.
Ukrainian commanders hope, among other things, that their Russian counterparts will ease some of the pressure on their beleaguered men by forcing Moscow to divert forces to try to repel the Ukrainian incursion.
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“Russia has relocated some of its units from both Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions of Ukraine’s south,” Ukrainian army spokesman Dmytro Lykhoviy told Politico, acknowledging that the redeployment involves a “relatively small” number of troops.
Still, Russian forces continue to press towards Pokrovsk, a key node of Ukrainian military logistics in Donbas. “The coming days will show whether there are enough reserves to maintain this pressure,” former Estonian intelligence chief Rainer Saks wrote on social media.
