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.

  • LukácsFan1917@lemmy.ml
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    17 days ago

    Why exactly are you so convinced Russian leadership wants to massacre Ukraine and have a wasteland on the border? Ukraine was a vital trading partner for Russia prior to the western coup. Why do you think that the US and its allies fund a proxy war on Ukrainian territory? Out of the goodness of their hearts? They have been privatizing state assets in Ukraine, speculating on them, taking advantage of the spike in European requirement for US natural gas to replace Russia, and making huge military industrial purchases to replace what Russia destroys.

    I’m sure Russia will settle for a slowly steamrolled Ukraine as a second option if the terror attacks on Russian office buildings etcetera continue, they might not even stop at western Ukraine, it could go on for years. They have been willing at many points to freeze the conflict so that they can go on making some money with Ukraine. Like I said it took them ten years to come to the aid of Donbas while civilians were being bombed there (Ukrainian leadership openly bragged about making the eastern Ukrainians’ children stay in bomb shelters rather than school). The west chose the drawn out destruction of cities, the destruction of a dam for no good reason.

    • shapesandstuff@feddit.org
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      17 days ago

      surely you have a lot of irrefutable sources for your claims.
      It’s crazy how many people here are touting the widely disclaimed coup or genocide.
      Like surely there’s a lot of publicly accessible, independent data on all of that, right?
      Surely there’s a very good reason why Crimea was invaded in a cloak-and-dagger operation by unmarked soldiers while russia officially demented any accusations it’s their troops? Surely.

      • LukácsFan1917@lemmy.ml
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        17 days ago

        It’s 2024 and you are deepthroating the White House narrative. You trust the people who invaded Iraq because they said Al-Qaeda was there to tell you who “the bad guy” is.

        I will show you plenty of sources, including actual video of Ukrainian forces torturing and killing civilians that has been verified independently. But first I want a source for your claim that Russia is indiscriminately bombing civilians. I will show you how easy it is to verify that your sources are not independent, funded by western finance capital, and undermined by statements from think tanks which cater to higher brow audiences on “your side” aka the ruling class that knows you don’t know how to research and most of their population is functionally illiterate.

        I am well aware of what the headlines say. You don’t know your head from your ass without the Associated Press or the BBC weighing in on the subject.

        • shapesandstuff@feddit.org
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          17 days ago

          White House narrative

          Muricacentric much?

          But first I want a source for your claim that Russia is indiscriminately bombing civilians.

          Strawman, letsgooo.
          Besides your random made up arguments, here are some numbers on civilian casualties:
          https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293492/ukraine-war-casualties/

          There’s of course a bunch of civilian massacres still under active investigation, plus a lot of varying numbers between UA officials and independent reports. Mostly it’s just the precise numbers that are unclear, not the act itself. See:

          https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/f/a/515868.pdf https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/06/ukraine-deadly-mariupol-theatre-strike-a-clear-war-crime-by-russian-forces-new-investigation/ https://www.npr.org/2022/06/27/1107854331/russian-missile-strike-shopping-mall-kremenchuk

          But of course these are all western propaganda, please enlighten me with your credible sources full of irrefutable proof that i’m entirely consumed by fake news.

          • LukácsFan1917@lemmy.ml
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            17 days ago

            It’s not a strawman you just again said that “of course” there’s a bunch of civilian massacres under investigation. You literally just made the same argument you said was a strawman a sentence ago. Show your sources so we can expose your total intellectual dependence on spoon feeding from the media of the US and its allies.

            The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) verified a total of 35,160 civilian casualties during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as of July 31, 2024. Of them, 23,640 people were reported to have been injured. However, OHCHR specified that the real numbers could be higher.

            I already know of this. First of all this statistic is of the total reports of civilian deaths on both sides in the war, this already shows you are terrible at reading. How am I supposed to expect you to treat anything else I show you seriously when you cannot even read your own material? You can’t chalk up every single civilian death reported in the conflict to Russia, that is completely idiotic.

            Second, they are taking Ukrainian government reports at face value. Prior to the war in Ukraine The Guardian and BBC and NYT all commented on how corrupt the Ukrainian state is, among the worst in the world.

            Third, the UN human rights commission is headed by an EU guy, and is overall an institution which is controlled by the US and never intervenes in US imperialism. The US openly mocks UN officials it has problems with, like with the Iraq war, and uses its clout to prevent Iranian, Russian and Venezuelan politicians from accessing the UN without being arrested. The UN’s total abdication of responsibility as an international human rights institution and subservient reliance on the US and its allies has been put on full display by a year of genocide in Gaza.

            https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/03/17/human-rights-ngo-hrw-amnesty-us-government/ Yes Amnesty has close ties to the White House. The global financial system, telecommunications, journalist and academia, it’s all very centralized with America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, and to some extent wealth petromonarchies’ main cities Riyadh, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi

            • shapesandstuff@feddit.org
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              17 days ago

              Righty, we’re playign a game of semantics not content. Got it.
              I wrote

              totally reasonable in his target choices?

              Any further specific claims came from you.

              Further:

              There’s of course a bunch of civilian massacres still under active investigation, plus a lot of varying numbers between UA officials and independent reports.

              me acknowledging the unclear nature of war-time reports.
              Again, the rest is you projecting a slightly different argument onto my words to give yourself an easier time filing me away as a “propaganda victim” or whatever.

              First of all this statistic is of the total reports of civilian deaths on both sides in the war, this already shows you are terrible at reading

              If I were to argue like you do, I’d now go off about how you claim ALL civilian casualties died at Ukrainian hands.
              I don’t do that though, instead I’d ask you to provide the detailed breakdown you seem to have you hands on.

              You seem to also have missed this:

              The figures exclude Crimea and Sevastopol due to the lack of corroborating information.

              Meaning, your alleged genocide is not in this dataset.

              And lastly, you’re still not providing literally anything of substance yourself. You only tactic is discredit any potential source and ignore the ones you don’t wanna engage with in advance so you can later claim “no that one doesn’t count, I already said it’s propaganda” while the only thing you’re currently leaning on is an opinion piece from a heavily biased borderline conspiracy rag.

              Either you engage with what I’m writing and work with the people you’re talking to, or you keep arguing in bad faith. If you pick the latter, feel free, go off king, i’m not interested.

              • LukácsFan1917@lemmy.ml
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                16 days ago

                Also, I am convinced you are just stupid at this point. Crimea not being in the dataset doesn’t refute a single thing I said. You’re completely incoherent in every comment.

                  • LukácsFan1917@lemmy.ml
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                    16 days ago

                    Actually I want to ramp this up. Give me one example of a massacre on Ukrainian soil committed by the Russians. If you want to use Bucha I have plenty of material about that which was written by a guy I know in Oregon. But I would prefer to give you yet another opportunity to show you have a single non US propaganda source.

              • LukácsFan1917@lemmy.ml
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                16 days ago

                Your only “tactics” are thought cancelling cliches, creating a semantic difference where there is none, and again rebuking sources as “propaganda rags” you didn’t even attempt to argue with me pointing out Western sources have a conflict of interest when reporting on their own war.

                I like how you primarily quoted yourself and chose to ignore all of the “content” you were actually presented with. I responded directly to your sources and claims, you leave me with pedantry and a refusal to examine what I posted. I doubt there is a good reason to continue this discussion but like I said, we are still unpacking the premises of what we are arguing over. I raised doubt about the basis of your claims, we are not going to just mindlessly run with you sourcing only one side of the conflict.

                You are already retreating from your claims about Russians indiscriminately targeting civilians. I guess I caught you empty-handed.

                • shapesandstuff@feddit.org
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                  16 days ago

                  You didnt present anything buddy. I read your link. It was inconsequential. Do you have anything that actually refute any of the facts? Lets just go for the civillian deaths, ignoring all and any speculative accusations. Just the hard numbers. Who killed them. How many?

                  The argument wasnt about which source you like. You just pivoted there for you have nothing relevant to add. Your first move was to deflect from the topic at hand to an argument about sources. Okay there are dozens of them, which ones do you allow for this discussion?

                  Okay, cool, news sites have conflicts of interest. Thats why you vet the ones that are mostly neutral DESPITE ties. Same applies to yours, but thats nothing you can even fucking fathom.

                  Stop deflecting. Stay on topic for just one comment.

                  Drop your sources on the civillian deaths or shut up and move on.

                  • LukácsFan1917@lemmy.ml
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                    16 days ago

                    Well I mean we did start off by talking about your claim the Russians are indiscriminately bombing civilians though! I would prefer to get your unsourced claim out of the way so we can see that yes, it is just parroting what the Ukrainian government says. But yes I will show you videos the Ukrainians themselves have posted of hurting civilians in a second. You do not get to flip around your claim and demand I prove a negative. That’s not how it works.

                    As an aside, I know significantly more about the Grayzone’s conflicts of interests than you LMAO. They are not infallible, all modern journalism is severely limited due to financial, and political constraints. I will source US financial news frequently because they say the quiet part louder than CNN and NBC et al