By The New York Times (World News) | Created at 2024-09-23 09:10:07 | Updated at 2024-09-30 09:26:16
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Finland’s president and NATO’s departing secretary general are urging Mr. Biden to allow Ukraine to use weapons to hit bases deeper inside Russia.
Steven Erlanger, based in Berlin, writes about European politics and diplomacy.
Sept. 23, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET
President Biden will be under increasing pressure this week to loosen restrictions on Ukraine’s use of weapons when global leaders converge on the United Nations for their annual gathering.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine will also come with what he calls a victory plan for Mr. Biden to examine, and key European leaders are already pushing hard for Mr. Biden to allow him to use longer-range weapons supplied by NATO countries to hit farther inside Russia, to strike bases from which Russian planes and missiles attack Kyiv with relative impunity.
The push comes as Ukraine is slowly losing ground to mass Russian assaults in the eastern Donbas region and Russia continues to pound Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, including electricity and heating plants, from a safe distance as winter is approaching.
Mr. Biden has been reluctant to give permission, careful as he has been since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 not to escalate the war and risk a direct conflict between Moscow and the NATO alliance. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia already blames NATO for the war and has made threats of retaliation, including frequent veiled references to his nuclear arsenal. But he has not retaliated militarily against the West even as NATO countries have gradually increased the quantity and quality of their arms supplies to Kyiv.
Finland’s new president, Alexander Stubb, joined the chorus for longer-range weapons in an interview with The New York Times, while Jens Stoltenberg, in his last days as NATO secretary general, has all but done the same, while noting diplomatically that each country must decide for itself.
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