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Lord Kim Darroch, Britain’s former national security adviser, has warned that allowing long-range Storm Shadow missiles to be fired by Ukraine into Russia risks a major escalation of the conflict.
Darroch, ex-ambassador to Washington, said western allies should think carefully about Vladimir Putin’s warnings of a war between Moscow and Nato. “We really don’t want to escalate this,” he told the Financial Times.
Sir Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, has said it should be up to Ukraine how it uses weapons supplied by its allies — including Anglo-French Storm Shadow cruise missiles — provided they are used for defensive purposes and within international law.
British officials said Starmer would make that case on Friday in talks with Joe Biden in Washington, but the US president has yet to give the green light for what would be a pivotal move in the conflict.
The US may in the coming days grant the UK and France permission to let Kyiv use their long-range strike weapons, which rely on American navigational data, inside Russia as requested by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said people familiar with the discussions.
The US could also allow Ukraine to use the ground-launched Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACM, for the same purpose, the people said.
But the Biden administration remains split over the issue and officials said they do not expect a change on Friday, although they expect Starmer to push the matter.
“There is no change to our view on the provision of long-range strike capabilities for Ukraine to use inside Russia, and I wouldn’t expect any sort of major announcement in that regard coming out of the discussions,” US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said ahead of the summit.
Darroch said that just because Putin had previously not carried through on threats of reprisals when the west supplied battle tanks and missiles to Ukraine, it did not mean the same would apply to cruise missile strikes on his territory.
“If they are confident that he’s bluffing, then fine,” he said. “But he’s bluffing until he isn’t.”
Darroch added that he was not convinced that using Storm Shadow missiles to hit targets in Russia would be a decisive factor in the war.
Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, said on Friday that if the west allowed Kyiv to conduct strikes deep into his country then Nato countries would be “conducting direct war with Russia”.
“The facts are that Nato will be a direct party to hostilities against a nuclear power,” he told the UN security council. “I think you shouldn’t forget about this and think about the consequences.”
Putin said on Thursday that the deployment of longer-range weapons against targets inside Russia would mean Nato would be “at war” with Moscow.
The use of the missiles was at the top of the agenda of Biden and Starmer’s White House talks on Friday but a final decision on whether to allow Kyiv to expand its military operations in Russia was likely to be taken around the UN General Assembly meeting later this month, UK diplomats said.
Starmer and Biden are expected to be in New York for the meeting along with other western allies and Zelenskyy.
The Ukrainian president has been lobbying western allies for permission to use the ATACM and Storm Shadow cruise missiles on targets inside Russia.
“Anyone who sees at a map where Russia launches its strikes from, trains its forces, keeps its reserves, locates its military facilities, and what logistics uses clearly understands why Ukraine needs long-range capabilities,” he said on X on Friday.
The UK was the first country to send long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine and has long taken a more permissive approach to how the weapons it supplies are deployed. Defence insiders say they would like to do the same with Storm Shadows — if agreement can be reached with Kyiv’s other backers.
Less than a week after becoming prime minister in July, Starmer said the arsenal of weapons contributed by the UK must be “used in accordance with international humanitarian law” but added: “It is for Ukraine to decide how to deploy it for those defensive purposes.”
A month earlier, Rishi Sunak, then UK prime minister, said: “How Ukraine uses the weapons that we provide is for them. Our job is to make sure we give them the capabilities that we can that they need.”