In recent days, the US Government has quietly granted Ukraine permission to use weapons provided by Washington to attack targets inside Russia. The authorization is limited, according to officials from Joe Biden’s Administration cited by the US media, to operations in defense of the city of Kharkiv, the second city in the country, which is the target of a bloody campaign by the Russian Army.
The news, announced this Thursday afternoon by Politicalrepresents a change in the Pentagon’s strategy, although the aforementioned officials assure that this new guideline does not affect the permission to undertake long-range attacks in Russia, something that the United States has opposed since the beginning of the invasion. in February 2022.
No details have been released at this time about how and when this change of mind occurred, except that it came “in the last few days.” In practice, it means that Ukrainian troops have permission to use rockets and rocket launchers provided by the United States to hit units on the other side of the border that separates the two countries. Attacks on civilian targets are also ruled out.
According to the same anonymous sources, President Joe Biden made the decision, which represents a surprising change in the policy of his Administration, in view of the worsening Ukrainian prospects in the eastern theater of the conflict.
At the beginning of May, the Russian army opened a new front north of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city. Located in the east of the country, it has suffered daily bombings this year from the other side of the border, just 25 kilometers away, but then it was once again threatened by a ground offensive. Before that, the Ukrainian Armed Forces had already warned of the concentration of enemy troops for an imminent attack.
The Biden administration had dropped that a decision had been made secretly in recent days that would be announced soon. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was the first to publicly hint at a change of heart by Biden. The spokesman for the White House National Security Council, John Kirby, did not later rule out that possibility when asked by journalists.
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