Archives for 2024

A quick housekeeping note. Rosie had her fourth treatment of round three today. Which is the last treatment of round three. In two weeks she’ll start round four. Right now she’s up on the couch resting. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

As air raid alerts go up and down all over Ukraine, as is the case every night around midnight local time in Ukraine, we find out that Britain asked the US – that’s Britain not Ukraine – for permission a month ago to allow Ukraine to use storm shadow missiles against legitimate military targets in Russia. And over a month later they are still waiting on an answer from the Biden administration because the request is “stuck within the system.”

❗️🇺🇸🇬🇧🇺🇦 The UK has formally asked the Biden Admin to stop prohibiting Ukraine from using Storm Shadow to strike Russian territory!

Over a month later, they are still waiting for a response.

Absolutely disgraceful.

Reporting via The Times. Link in alt text. pic.twitter.com/66Dsattajn

— Colby Badhwar 🇨🇦🇬🇧 (@ColbyBadhwar) August 19, 2024

From The Times: (emphasis mine)

Washington is in effect blocking Britain from allowing Kyiv to fire Storm Shadow missiles inside Russia, amid fears in the Biden administration of an escalation in the Ukraine war.

As pressure grows on the West to relax its rules around the use of long range weapons, Britain is waiting for US approval before it gives the Ukrainians the green light. However, the request went into the system more than a month ago and officials are still waiting, a UK government source said.

They said their understanding was that the topic was effectively “stuck in their system”. A second UK government source confirmed that “discussions were still ongoing around Storm Shadow with allies” and a third defence source described it as “routine US process”.

It is understood that although the UK wants to give Ukraine the freedom to do what they want with the long-range weapon, it requires consensus from allies, including the US, France and a third undisclosed Nato country. A government source stressed that the UK was not blaming the US for any delay, adding that such policy changes took time.

Storm Shadows can fire at targets more than 155 miles away and could be used to hit military bases deeper inside Russia that have been crucial for Moscow’s war effort inside Ukraine.

Sabrina Singh, the deputy spokeswoman for the US department of defence admitted in a briefing on Thursday that the US was “worried about escalation” when it came to Ukraine’s use of long range strikes.

She also suggested long range weapons were not needed to help Ukraine liberate its territory.

I’m going to break in here to explain that Ms. Singh is a professional campaign communications advisor who has worked for Mike Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns and has no actual military experience whatsoever.

Matthew Palmer, chargé d’affaires of the US to the UK, in a Times Radio interview to be broadcast on Sunday, distanced himself from the notion that the US had any say in the matter, saying that the terms under which UK weapons could be used were a matter for London and Kyiv. “I’m not going to insert myself into that conversation,” he told Theo Usherwood.

Me again: Ambassador Palmer is a very bad liar.

One theory inside the UK military is that the US may be waiting to assess the impact or the consequences of the Ukrainian operation into Russia before making a decision, although they said they expected the matter to be quickly resolved.

A member of Ukraine’s defence committee told The Times that Ukraine had been forced to undertake its cross-border operation into Kursk due to the West’s refusal to allow Kyiv to use long-range cruise missiles on targets in Russia.

President Zelensky has repeatedly requested permission to use American-donated ATACMS and British Storm Shadows to strike targets deep within Russia, but each time has been rebuffed over fears that it could lead to an escalation in the conflict.

Solomiia Bobrovska, a Ukrainian MP, said that Russian gains made on the eastern front since the start of this year could have been stopped had Ukraine been able to use these weapons to destroy military and logistics targets deep behind the frontlines.

The assault on the Russian region of Kursk, now entering its 12th day, she said, was a defensive action necessitated by Russia’s incremental but steady progress, and the continual aerial attacks on its civilians who live in cities close to the border, such as Sumy and Kharkiv.

Bobrovska last week returned from Washington where she was representing the Ukrainian parliament’s defence and security committee to press American senators and congressmen to allow for the use of ATACMS.

“If we had been allowed to use these long-range missiles in Russia, we would have been able to prevent a lot of their attacks and offensive operations,” she said. “And I truly believe that the map now would be like it was in 2023, or even better.”

She said that Britain and the US’s refusal to grant permission amounted to a “betrayal” of the security guarantees that Ukraine was given as part of the Budapest memorandum in 1994 in return for destroying the nuclear weapons left in the country following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“The West promised to protect us, and yet now every day we find ourselves having to prove why we need these long-range weapons in order to protect ourselves,” she said.

President Zelensky suggested to The Guardian in May that in reality Downing Street was waiting on the Americans to give their approval.

A final decision by the UK and other partners depended on “consensus”, with the position in Washington being crucial, he suggested. “You know how it works,” he added.

Colby Badhwar, an independent military analyst, told The Times: “The Biden administration continues to maintain their policy that Ukraine is not permitted to use long range fires to strike deep into Russia; a prohibition that applies not just to the American ATACMS, but the British Storm Shadow as well.”

More at the link.

For want of a nail!!!!

I mean lets be honest here, Secretary Blinken cooked the NSM-20 report to Congress so that the Biden administration could still sell and transfer weapons to Israel. Bibi recklessly escalates solely to protect his political position and to keep his tuchas out of prison, while continuously ratfucking the ceasefire for hostage release negotiations making it easy for Hamas to reject every proposal, and our response is to put two carrier strike groups and an entire USAF air wing into the region to protect the Israelis from their mad self declared king and his messianically delusional extremist ministers who are in the process of setting fire to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Harem al Sharif/Temple Mount and the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement as a result. The Ukrainians beg us to let them use long range weapons to strike legitimate military targets in Russia that are attacking civilian targets – people, homes, the energy generation and transmission grid, Ukrainian granaries, schools, supermarkets, parks – and it’s whoa there buckaroo, cool your jets, let’s not be doing anything hasty.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today at the meeting of the Heads of Ukraine’s Foreign Diplomatic Missions “Wartime Diplomacy: Resilience, Weapons, Victory” conference. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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War for Ukraine Day 908: “Stuck Within the System”Post + Comments (41)