In the final months of the Joe Biden Presidency, the war in Ukraine hit a new milestone.
In an attack on Tuesday, Ukraine for the first time used American long-range missiles to strike inside Russian territory, according to The New York Times.
And it came on the same day Russian President Vladimir Putin made a move on the use of nuclear weapons.
The Times reported that Russian military officials had announced that six long-range ballistic missiles — “known as Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS” — had been fired at the Bryansk region in southwestern Russia.
Ukraine had been agitating for Biden’s permission to use the missiles for months, according to the Times. That permission became public on Sunday.
A Ukraine official said the missile targets were warehouses for “artillery ammunition, including North Korean ammunition for their systems,” according to the Times.
The Russians claimed that the attack was a failure, with five of the six missiles being shot down and the sixth being damaged before it struck, with falling fragments causing fires but no casualties, according to the Times.
Regardless of the actual impact of the attack — and unconfirmed statements from the Russian military can’t be taken at face value — the incident raises the stakes in the war that started with Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
Putin has long saber-rattled with the threat of using nuclear weapons.
On Tuesday, according to the Times, the Russian government made official a new nuclear doctrine announced in September that would threaten the United States with nuclear attack in response to any attack from Ukraine that are conducted with U.S. support, the Times reported.
“Aggression against the Russian Federation and (or) its allies by any nonnuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state is considered as their joint attack,” the document states, according to the Times.
Before Tuesday, Russian nuclear doctrine was aimed at nuclear states — such as the U.S. — and referred to conventional attacks that threatened “the very existence of the state.”
The new doctrine has a considerably lower threshold, and thus raises the threat of nuclear war considerably higher.
The development comes as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House in January.
Trump made ending the war in Ukraine a priority during the presidential campaign.
In a video posted to the social media platform X on Monday, Trump called on both Putin and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to meet with him to put an end to the fighting.
The world, he said, “has never been closer to World War III than we are today under Joe Biden.”
I am hereby calling on Putin and Zelensky to meet with me and get this terrible war between Russia and Ukraine solved. We have never been closer to a nuclear WWIII than we are right now. We must stop the killing and prevent World War III.
NO WORLD WAR 3pic.twitter.com/C5rYzYidAb
— Donald J. Trump News (@_IDonaldTrump) November 18, 2024
“A global conflict between nuclear-armed powers would mean death and destruction on a scale unmatched in human history,” he said.
Calling for an immediate “total cessation of hostilities,” he said “we need peace without delay.”
He also went on a slashing attack against some American institutions at home for contributing to the instability in the world.
“The State Department, the defense bureaucracy, the intelligence services, and all of the rest need to be completely overhauled and reconstituted to fire the deep-staters and put America first.
“We have to put America first.”
He also said the role of NATO needs to be re-evaluated. Ukraine’s application for NATO membership would put the North Atlantic Treaty Organization right on Russian borders.
“Our foreign policy establishment keeps trying to pull the world into conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia based on the lie that Russia represents our greatest threat,” he said.
But the greatest threats United States faces, he said, come from inside the country — the open borders policies of the Biden-Harris administration, crime in the cities, and “the destruction of the rule of law from within.”
“I am hereby calling on Putin and Zelensky to meet with me and get this terrible war between Russia and Ukraine solved,” Trump wrote over the video.
“We have never been closer to a nuclear WWIII than we are right now. We must stop the killing and prevent World War III.
“NO WORLD WAR 3.”
