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.
By Steven Erlanger
September 23, 2024
The New York Times
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.
Mr. Stubb, who will speak for all the Nordic countries at the U.N. General Assembly, was blunt. “I call upon our allies in the global West, including the United States, to allow Ukraine to fight without one hand tied behind its back and to lift those restrictions,” he said in a wide-ranging interview on Thursday from Helsinki. “We need to continue to support Ukraine, starting with finance, starting with ammunition, starting with vehicles, and also with allowing Ukraine to use weapons as itself pleases, as long as it’s in self-defense and within the framework of international rules.”
Mr. Stoltenberg has been unusually outspoken as he prepares to leave office at the end of the month. “I fully understand the desire from Ukraine to have as few restrictions as possible,” he said in an interview with Christiane Amanpour of CNN. “There are less restrictions now than
just some months ago,” he said, “and that’s the right thing to do,” because “this is a war of aggression” and “according to international law, self-defense is legal.”
Ukraine, he said, “has the right for self-defense and that includes striking legitimate military targets on the territory of the aggressor, Russia.” And NATO countries, he went on, “have the right to provide the weapons that they are using to do so without us becoming a party to the conflict.”
Both Mr. Stubb and Mr. Stoltenberg noted that various allied “red lines” had already been crossed, with the provision to Ukraine of Leopard II battle tanks, Storm Shadow and Scalp cruise missiles, longer-range artillery and even American-made F-16 fighter jets. All were subject to fierce debates over whether they would prompt Mr. Putin to escalate the fight and even use nuclear weapons.
The new prime minister of Britain, Keir Starmer, has also pushed Mr. Biden to allow the use of these longer-range weapons, like Storm Shadow and Scalp, its French version, to hit bases farther into Russia from where Mr. Putin launches attacks.
Adm. Rob Bauer, chairman of the NATO Military Committee, said last week that attacks deep inside Russia were legal, because “to weaken the enemy that attacks you, you not only fight the arrows that come your way but also attack the archer.” Still, he said, nations providing weapons can demand “certain limitations” in their use, “because they feel responsible for those weapons.”
Mr. Stubb, whose country joined NATO only in response to the war and shares a long border with Russia, has few illusions about what he considers NATO’s need to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine. “Russia is an imperial power that has expansion in its DNA,” he said. “So what we need to do is to convince Putin that there’s no point for him to continue this war, and I think Putin needs to lose both the war and the peace, because the only thing that he understands is power,” Mr. Stubb said.
“The key is to allow Ukraine to fight this war without any kind of restrictions, and everything after that is secondary,” Mr. Stubb said. “The more we allow Ukraine to act, the sooner we will achieve peace negotiations.” Then the West must provide Kyiv with security guarantees leading to membership in both NATO and the European Union, he said.
Mr. Stoltenberg agreed. “By giving Ukraine more weapons, we can make Putin realize he cannot get what he wants by force and make it so costly that he will have to accept Ukraine has a sovereign, democratic right to exist as a sovereign, democratic country,” he said in a speech last week in Brussels to the German Marshall Fund. “The paradox is that the more weapons for Ukraine we are able to deliver, the more likely it is that we can reach a peace and end to the war. And the more credible our long-term military support, the sooner the war will end.”
Given raging global conflicts, including in the Middle East and Africa, the United Nations must re-engage in true peacekeeping, Mr. Stubb said. To that end, in New York, he said he would propose an expansion of the U.N. Security Council to include five new permanent members, one from Latin America, two from Asia and two from Africa, coupled with 10 rotating members and an elimination of the single-country veto, “which makes the Security Council dysfunctional.” He
would also propose that a member country “in blatant violation of the U.N. Charter and international law, such as Russia is right now in Ukraine,” should be suspended by a vote of the General Assembly.
Serious changes to the Security Council have proved impossible in the past, given the veto, he concedes, but he insists that the crisis demands new thinking. The veto might be replaced by weighted voting, he said, but it was crucial to include members of the so-called Global South, developing countries largely left out of post-1945 international institutions.
Those countries may see hypocrisy in the criticism of Russia and the support for Israel in Gaza, he said. “But my argument to our friends in the Global South, who are sometimes justifiably expressing doubts about Western double standards, is to say that this war in Ukraine sets the scene for how other nation-states can behave in the rest of the world,” he said. “If we now allow Russian imperialism to take place, we will see this happening elsewhere in the world, and that’s why I think this is a key struggle for all of us.”
Steven Erlanger is the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe and is based in Berlin. He has reported from over 120 countries, including Thailand, France, Israel, Germany and the former Soviet Union.