Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States have lifted restrictions on the types of weapons that can be supplied to Ukraine, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced on May 26. (video)
The move clears the way for the EU to send its most powerful and long-range missiles to Kyiv that can strike targets deep inside Russian territory, something the allies have been reluctant to do for fears of escalating tensions with the Kremlin and possibly provoking a direct clash between Russia and Nato countries in Europe.
"There are no longer any range restrictions on weapons supplied to Ukraine, not from the British, not from the French, not from us, not from the Americans either. This means that Ukraine can now also defend itself by attacking military positions in Russia, for example,” Merz said during an interview on German television. “It couldn’t do that until some time ago, and with very few exceptions, it didn’t do that until some time ago. Now it can. In jargon, we call this long-range fire, i.e., equipping Ukraine with weapons that attack military targets in the rear.”
The decision comes the day after Russia launched a devastating missile and drone barrage on Ukraine over the weekend of May 23-25 that largely targeted civilian targets in Kyiv and many other urban centres in Ukraine – amongst the largest attacks since the war started over three years ago.
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The decision also clears the way for Germany to deliver its powerful Taurus cruise missiles that Kyiv had been asking for, but Berlin had so far been reluctant to supply. Merz didn’t mention the Taurus missiles by name during his interview, but has suggested that unlike former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he was not against supplying Kyiv with the missile, which can hit Russian targets deep in the rear or could destroy the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula.
Deep inside. They should reduce putins homes to rubble. That shitbird keeps hitting civilian targets. It seems like striking his home and the homes of other russian thugs would be nightmare fuel for them and make them lose the will to fight. After all that is what they think killing all those children will do to Ukraine.
I hope Ukraine gets mostly bunker buster missiles for high value targets.
Target the rich, spare the poor.
Yup, target the guilty which is the rich in this case.
I mean it’s not even a secret anymore that huge palace he built for himself on the Black Sea- makes a nice juicy target for a barrage of cruise missles
Yeah that one and any other place he nests. They should hit the kremlin.
They won’t lose the will to fight. Russians are indoctrinated psychopaths. I spoke to half a dozen of them before the war. They think they are gods chosen people. It’s full on cult status. They will burn in hell if there is a hell. But not until then.
Slava Ukraine! Strike hard, strike deep, and let 'em feel the burn.
The Moscow middle class are about to get a very real taste of the war.
Not quite, unfortunately… these cruise missiles don’t have the range to cover the distance to Moscow. Perhaps another exploratory excursion into the Kursk region might be necessary?
I doubt they have the man power to pull that off again.
You’re likely right, but one can still dream!
A world without Putin and Russian aggression, a peaceful and prosperous Ukraine…
Dropping a $4M warhead on a $40k home, then complaining because you’ve run out of ammo again.
And westerners wonder why their military leadership keeps losing wars.
I was unaware Russia is considered western
Bring up a picture of King George V and Tsar Nicholas II.
It’s Hapsburgs all the way down.
You realize Russia asked their Hapsburgs to leave quite a while ago, right? During one of those big family fueds. They were quite insistent about it, too, even more so than the French.
Trying to ignore how the current United Russia movement has joined at the hip with the Italians, the Germans, the French, the Brits, and the Americans all begging to align around a new anti-Muslim Axis of Fascism is blindingly obtuse.
Hell, the one thing it seems all of these countries agree on is how much they support Palestinian Genocide. What Russia has done to Ukraine is just another facet of the European desire to ethnically cleanse the rest of the planet.
Lol
Since this is your honest concern, I hope you won’t complain if Russian damages exceed Western donations.
I think we’re way past the point of complaining. The entire region seems intent on industrialized murder-suicide thanks to decades of US warmongering. The only way out of this is via a sealed box car and a junior officers revolt.
Military budgets are placed based on the value of what they’re protecting (physical assets, economic activity, etc), not based on the wealth of the people who could destroy your assets/activities.
Military budgets are placed based on the value of what they’re protecting
That’s not even remotely true. The military budget has no correlation with changes in GDP.
The US has pressured Europe for decades to spend 2% of their GDP on defense.
Trump seems to have finally broken them.
NATO’s Rutte says he assumes alliance will agree on 5% spending target
The MIC is going to be in the money now. Good news for Boeing.
As someone in defense, Boeing sucks.
Regardless, my point was just that spending targets were indeed pegged to GDP.
The EU is not growing its GDP at anywhere near 5% outside of Malta. Average across the bloc is 1.2%
During the boom years of the 90s, Europe (and the US) were cutting defense spending not raising them. It was only during big downturns that we saw them ratchet the military spending up again.
If MIC spending is anything, it is counter-cyclical.
Good hunting, I assume they know the location of more than one dacha belonging to Vlad
Slava Ukraini
Am I the only one surprised to see the USians supporting this? In spite of Trump. Just great!
If anyone can share details on this… It would be very welcome
Trump probably doesn’t understand what it means
Perhaps not… I always considered he could be Putin’s puppet. I know he ‘simply’ admires another dictator but still, I always entertained the hypothesis… Just for being cynical, you know? :p
Under such POV, he’s just waging war. There should be some interest (i.e. looking forward to the autoproclaimed “peace” negotiations)…
Time will tell xD
Trump is terrified of putin. Trump laundered money for putin for decades under threat of death. Look around. The articles are starting to appear with some pretty decent evidence to support the idea that trump has never been more than a tool for putin.
I’m sorry, but starting? This has been well-known for at least a decade. Hillary called him on it during a 2016 debate.
IF Trump is mentally competent enough to know what it means then something probably happened in private between Trump and Putin. Both the old men are aggressive and senile so it’s difficult to say what exactly. Maybe Putin dropped the bombshell statement that he wants to be in charge of the USA.
Am I the only one surprised to see the USians supporting this? In spite of Trump.
Trump supports the MIC first and foremost
Here comes a senseless world war. Here’s hoping Russia backs down fast.
We tried appeasement before the last World War and that doesn’t work. You’ve got to stand up to bullies.
Fascism can only be defeated through the power of incredible violence. Kindness and compassion don’t mean anything to fascists beyond something to exploit.
Death to Fascists
Amen!
Death to Fascists
It’s funny how, according to online commenters, every single thing the west did in support of Ukraine over the last few years would cause a new world war. We should be at WW42 by now!
I’m of service age, labour (uk government) and the Tories tickled around the idea of national service and patriotism has been ramping up in the last year.
The world war is already here, it’s just not all-out yet. This policy change isn’t going to be the instigator of it.
Regardless of Trump, the US is not the preeminent military or economic power in the world anymore. Further, the global climate is changing. As such, a global reshuffling of resources and alliances is inevitable.
Mr. Zelenskyy, remember to send one to the White House with a thank you note.
Let’s see if this forces the Russians to negotiate in good faith. Either way, now the ukrainians can fight better
Good faith and Russia don’t ever belong in the same sentence. They only understand superior armaments.
They should have done this a year ago, though now’s the second best time.
I hope this announcement means that the Taurus missiles are already in Ukrainian hands, and ideally one of them is rapidly approaching a high-value target that has hitherto been considered safe.
The concept was very clearly to slowly push Putin red line, let him walk it back a little, rince and repeat. Because like it or not, Putin has nuclear weapons and that’s enough of a threat to not take the risk of skipping steps up the escalation ladder.
They should have done it at the start of the conflict
Or admitted Ukraine to NATO the first time Putler started making expansionist noises towards it.
Good and hopefully the weapons will tear new assholes into the Muscovites. Destroy the fucking Kerch bridge too!
I was just wondering to myself how long the West intended to just eat Russia’s shit when it comes to this constant disinformation undermining the integrity of their states before they would stop playing by the rules even the tiniest little bit. Unless every single Western leader is compromised it just didn’t make sense - and that level of compromise just didn’t seem likely. Maybe this is it.
I think it’s more about keeping Putler away from the nuke button. The West can easily take Russia. But Putler is an evil man who might prefer a burning world over defeat.
Xi has actually been the one slapping Putin’s wrist whenever the Russian dictator makes threats with nukes, even if the threats are empty. With three years of empty repetitive threats and Xi leashing Putin about it, this may have emboldened the West to finally allow Ukraine deep strikes and thinking to themselves “aww…the dog is all bark after all.”
Although on the one hand, some countries are still reliant on Russian gas and oil imports and receive them in stealthy ways. So the other motivation is not just fear of nukes, but also the possibility of economic paralysis if oil and gas supplies are affected.
A kind of terrifying thought Ive had, what if theyre waiting for russia to go ‘all in’ so that it can be attacked, stopped and occupied for profit.
Winning a nuclear war is unfortunately still losing
A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.. ... HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF CHESS?Exactly.
Yes, their “what’s the point of having a world if Russia isn’t in it” proves how insane they are.
Finally. But what’s been going on in Russia isn’t making sense either.
Consider: Some estimates show Russia used 69 missiles and 298 drones between May 23-25.
Googling, “How much does a Russian drone cost?” gives: The cost of Russian drones varies significantly depending on the type and capabilities. Some cheaper drones like the “Ghoul” quadcopter cost as little as $500, while others, like the Shahed-136, are estimated to range from $20,000 to $80,000. More advanced drones, such as the Merlin-VR, can cost over $300,000
So let’s say they used a mid-range drone, call it $30,000. 298 of them is $8,940,000.
Google again, “How much does a Russian missile used against Ukraine cost?”. Lots of variation, but call it $500,000 for each of the 69 used, for a total of $34,500,000.
So, for this two-day attack, they spent about $43-44 million dollars. And Google again, “How many people were killed in Ukraine May 23-25” says, “at least 12”.
Twelve people killed for $44 million. How stupid can you get? Do the Russians realize they could have simply bought the land they want in the Ukraine, if they’d done so through a dummy corporation or something like that?
I realize it’s the whole, “terror” thing, but frankly Ukraine ain’t terrified.
And now they’re going to be really well armed, and off the chain.
Thinking about this in terms of money spent is the wrong mindset. That 44 million dollars went from the hands of one Russian into the hands of another. And it even counts towards their GDP. On the other side, 12 Ukrainians are dead. Think about that. Depopulation, especially of working aged people is what’s really going to hurt your economy, not spending money on weapons.
As a sidenote, politicians often want you to believe that you can’t have nice things because “there isn’t enough money”. That is just bullshit.
Excellent points. While on the outside it does look like the Russians could have bought out all of Eastern Ukraine’s homeowners/farmers/citizens for $1 mil apiece, spent less money and still got the territory they want, it isn’t that simple.
The war never made economic sense. Russia was well off before, with a huge reserve. It could have invested in its own people. But it did not.
Even the second most important city of Russia, St Petersburg, is in shit ruins with infrastructure falling apart.
Well if you invest it into your people and infrastructure you can’t line you friends pockets 🤷♂️
Couldn’t they subcontract out the infrastructure construction to their friends?
But if they had to do honest work, they wouldn’t become even more filthy rich
This particular Russian attack seems to have been retaliatory in nature, because right before it Ukraine attacked Russian territory including Moscow with hundreds of drones at the same time.
Reported on here for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBAIalMNCAA
And here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NbxXJJJNZkI figure the logic of escalation here is something like “If Ukraine can already make massive strikes on Moscow with self produced drones there isn’t much sense in keeping up the range restrictions on NATO equipment anymore”.
Ukraine shut down 266 drones and 45 missiles.
That leaves 24 missile and 32 drone hits.
Even if they target infrastructure, 12 seems to be a very low number of casualities.
I would say that either Russia can’t aim or Ukraine is understating their defence capabilities.
There are air raid sirens. Hitting an empty building makes two dozen homeless, but kills nobody. Hitting in a schoolyard might main and cripple dozens, but kill nobody.
And of course, Ukraine is a country at war. They have an interest in understating casualties.
But in the end, terror bombing doesn’t work. It didn’t work for the Nazis, it didn’t work against the Nazis. It didn’t work in Vietnam, or Korea, or anywhere anyone has ever tried it. And it’s not working now.
Did it work on Japan?
One could argue that literally nuking two whole cities and burning a dozen more to the ground DID contribute to the surrender of a nation that was basically already defeated in every single way except for civilians with handguns and pointy bits of metal.
One could also argue the incredible scale of the allied bombing campaign on Japan wasn’t terror bombing. It wasn’t meant to scare the Japanese into surrender, it was meant to destroy them into surrender.
It took the entire industrial power of the allies to make it happen. Over 25000 sorties, millions of liters of napalm, hundreds of millions kilos of bombs (not counting 2 nukes), basically unopposed bombing for years in addition to ground and naval war.
And they still almost committed a coup and against god, rather than surrender.
Great comment but I’d just like to say that I’m pretty sure that there’s a hell of a lot of people over there that are indeed terrified.
giving what was lost in 1994 to ukraine too?,
Estonian military expert: Russia’s actions show they don’t really believe they can defeat Ukraine
Russia is trying to convince the world that they are winning their war on Ukraine, yet reality demonstrates the opposite, independent Riigikogu MP and Brigadier General (ret.) Alar Laneman said.
Time for Tomahawks as well, right?
Probably best to stick to something they can actually launch. The only ground-launched Tomahawks were nuclear weapons, and they haven’t been around since the 80s.
On the other hand, im sure if Ukraine got a few dozen of them, they’d make it work.
The INF went away in 2019 and the Typhon system entered service in 2023 so…ground launched Tomahawks are back on the menu.
I totally forgot about the Typhon!
The US Marines for the Long-Range Missile Battery, which is a ground based system able to launch Tomahawks. Basically a Mk41 on a truck.
Sure, Ukraine would improvise :) OTOH aren’t there also sea-launched ones? Shouldn’t be hard to adopt those.
As another poster replied: There are land-based launchers for (modified) Tomahawks, in the Typhon. What works against chinese ships would probably also work fine against russian surface sites (with a different type of cruise missile, probably)
