Acting quickly after getting the green light from the Biden administration, Ukrainian forces used U.S.-supplied ATACMS long-range missiles to attack a target inside Russian territory, officials in Moscow said Tuesday.
The statement from Russia’s Defense Ministry came just days after reports that President Biden signed off on allowing Ukraine to use ATACMS — the Army Tactical Missile System — against targets far behind Russian lines in the nearly three-year-old war.
“Last night at 3:25, the enemy struck a facility in the Bryansk region with six ballistic missiles. According to confirmed data, the American-made ATACMS operational-tactical missiles were used,” Russian military officials said on their Telegram social messaging page.
Moscow said air defense troops shot down five missiles and damaged a sixth, using their S-400 and Pantsir air defense missile systems. The fragments from the damaged ATACMS missile caused a “fire that was quickly extinguished” at a military facility in the target area.
Ukraine has yet to confirm that it launched the attack inside Russian territory, and the Russian government account could not be independently confirmed. Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened that the use of American-supplied missiles to strike Russian targets could dramatically escalate the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and could draw NATO into the fight.
The reported escalation came on the same day Mr. Putin formally approved an updated state policy effectively lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, expanding the list of criteria that would bring a response from Moscow’s huge arsenal of strategic weapons.
The new doctrine, approved earlier by the Russian parliament, said a nuclear response would be justified now in the face of “aggression by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear country” — a scenario that closely mirrors Ukraine’s situation, given the heavy support it has received from the U.S., Britain and France, all nuclear powers.
Mr. Putin would remain the “ultimate authority” on whether to launch a nuclear attack, the Kremlin said.
The Reuters news agency, citing a document posted on the official Russian government website, said the new doctrine approved by Mr. Putin also holds that “a nuclear response from Russia is possible in the event of a critical threat to its sovereignty, even with conventional weapons; in the event of an attack on Belarus as a member of the Union State; or] in the event of a massive launch of military aircraft, cruise missiles, drones, other aircraft and their crossing the Russian border.”
The office of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer issued an unusually harsh critique of the reported Russian nuclear shift.
“It would be fair to say it’s the latest example of irresponsibility that we’ve seen from the depraved Russian government,” Mr. Starmer’s office said in a statement. “We remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine and the defense of an illegal invasion, and we’ve always said that the defense of the UK starts in Ukraine.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday urged Western nations to closely study the new doctrine, which he said had been updated “to bring it into line with the current political landscape.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials reported a third Russian strike in three days on a civilian residential area in Ukraine killed at least 12 people, including a child, the Associated Press reported.
The strike by a Shahed drone in the northern Sumy region late Monday hit a dormitory of an educational facility in the town of Hlukhiv and wounded 11 others, including two children, authorities said, adding that more people could be trapped under the rubble.
• This story is based in part on wire service reports.
• Mike Glenn can be reached at mglenn@washingtontimes.com.