War: New UK Leader Starmer OK’s British Cruise Missiles For Strikes on Russian Mainland

Ukraine will be able to use advanced British-supplied cruise missiles to strike targets inside Russia itself, the UK’s new left-wing Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said in Washington at the NATO summit.

While Sir Keir Starmer may have promised change with his new Labour Party government to the voters of the United Kingdom, in at least one key area his policy is one of strong continuity, with new pledges of support for Ukraine announced at the NATO summit in Washington DC overnight. While Ukraine has already used the Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles to great effect in their defensive war against Russia, Sir Keir has given the nod for them to be used for new deep strikes inside Russia for the first time.

Sir Keir said it was a matter for Ukraine to decide how to use the missiles the UK had given it, reports Bloomberg, a departure from the previous British position. Starmer also made a new commitment to cash for Ukraine, promising £3 billion ($3.8bn) a year to Kyiv from the British exchequer for the five-year life of this Parliament, The Guardian reported.

Ukrainian President Zelensky, who had his first bilateral meeting with the new British Prime Minister at the summit, said of the cruise missiles: “This morning, I learned about the permission to use Storm Shadow missiles against military targets in Russian territory. Today, we had the opportunity to discuss the practical implementation of this decision.”

Those remarks follow other, broader remarks by President Zelensky as he described the importance he placed on the ability to use advanced Western weapons to strike inside Russia itself. This year Russia has value-engineered its assaults to some degree by retrofitting Cold War era dumb-bombs with satellite navigation-directed glide vanes, meaning the often enormous ordinance can be dropped by warplanes at a significant standoff distance and left to find their way to the target.

Shooting down these gliding bombs has proven difficult and costly, and Ukraine believes it is more effective to take out Russian warplanes on the ground before they can even take off with a load of glide-bombs. The powerful, long-range, and precise Western cruise missiles like the Storm Shadow are ideal for this work, Zelensky says.

He said yesterday on the sidelines of the NATO meeting, per Ukrainian government media: “Imagine how much we can achieve when all limitations are lifted. Similarly now we can protect our cities from Russian glide bombs if American leadership makes a step forward and allows us to destroy Russian military aircraft on their bases.

“This will also yield an instant result. And we are waiting for this step… And we can significantly limit Russian actions in southern Ukraine and push the occupier out of there if American leadership assists us with the necessary deep strike capabilities against Russian military and logistics in our Ukrainian Crimea.”

The Kremlin has responded to the British move to free up the use of cruise missiles in its typical way, comparable to all other recent minor escalations of the conflict, by issuing a complaint and threatening a retaliation. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said yesterday that the United Kingdom allowing Ukraine to strike inside Russia with British missiles is an: “absolutely irresponsible step… another irresponsible step towards rising tensions and seriously escalating the situation. We will carefully monitor this and, of course, take appropriate measures”.

Perhaps the most famous strikes by the Storm Shadow missiles in the Ukraine war so far have been against Russian-occupied Crimea, where the plunging bunker-busters have been used to destroy the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in one attack, and take out Russian warships alongside in another.