WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden’s administration will allow Ukraine to use U.S.-provided weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, three sources familiar with the matter said, in a significant change to Washington’s policy in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
Ukraine plans to conduct its first long-range attacks in the coming days, the sources said, without revealing details due to operational security concerns.
The move by the United States two months before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20 follows months of requests by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to allow Ukraine’s military to use U.S. weapons to hit Russian military targets far from its border.
The change follows Russia’s deployment of North Korean ground troops to supplement its own forces, a development that has caused alarm in Washington and Kyiv.
The first deep strikes are likely to be carried out using ATACMS rockets, which have a range of up to 190 miles (306 km), according to the sources.
If you include the global south (which obviously you should), most of the world sides with Russia. I’d agree with you that unless things really take a turn towards deescalation, which is laughably unlikely, history will look back at this time as WWIII having already begun. But it’s a lot more complicated than just a proxy war against Russia. It’s a proxy war the Western Imperialists via NATO but under the hegemonic control of the US in particular, is waging against the rising challengers of that hegemony. And primary among those is China, which is why we have the constant and unrelenting sinophobia and anti-China propaganda. It’s just that Russia has just been the first and boldest to actually use military force against the encroachment of western imperialist ambitions, but Iran is being forced into taking action now too. Also Hezbollah and Anserallah of course, but I mean among those that are fully recognized as state actors.
But no, if this does shape up to truly be WWIII, then the line is not between Russia and the world. The lines are between Western Imperialists and Multipolarists.
I don’t know if the global south really sides with anyone so much as watching from the sidelines. Not honoring sanctions isn’t the same as actively fighting.
i.e. Eastern Imperialists - let’s call them by what they are. This isn’t some noble quest to liberate countries from US control. It’s a maneuver to secure more power in the space before the red line of nuclear deterrence.
This isn’t freedom vs. imperialism, it’s just imperialism. The People’s Republic China has always been its own hegemony. Russia lost much of its sphere of influence during the collapse of the USSR, but it has made a solid effort to reclaim it since, e.g. with Belarus, Chechenya, Georgia and now Ukraine.
Neither the US “interventions” in the Middle East nor Israel’s “Operation Swords of Iron” against Palestine nor Russian “special operations” nor (PR)China’s claim to Taiwan (ROC) nor all the other power grabs I won’t bother listing (or don’t even know about) are anything but imperialist ambitions. There are no saints among the leaders in this global standoff.
But ultimately, it’s the people that pay the price in all of these conflicts. Human suffering, oppression, exploitation transcends all borders. We may have different leaders, different cultures, different experiences of life, but we’re united in the fact that we both will be the victims of this.
LOL, LMAO even.
That’s the whole problem with trying to break down geopolitics into set polarized factions. It makes annotating history a bit easier, but it completely forgoes any nuance.
I think a lot of people on Lemmy do it for emotional reasons, too. They can’t handle a grey-on-grey world, they need it to be black and white.
Yeah, the global south actually hates each other.
There needs to be a word for the cultivated delusion shared by the terminally online.