Russia-Ukraine WarState Department Walks Careful Line On Russian Attacks
Dec. 6, 2022Updated 6:30 p.m. ET
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Bakhmut, UkraineFew remaining residents venture out on the streets.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Kursk, RussiaDrone strike hits Russian air base.
MIC Izvestia/IZ.RU via Reuters
Bakhmut, UkraineA Ukrainian armored personnel carrier.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Kharkiv, UkraineAttending the funeral of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian writer.
Sergey Kozlov/EPA, via Shutterstock
Vyshhorod, Ukraine
Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images
Malotaranivka, UkraineThe aftermath of a missile attack at a school.
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Bakhmut, UkraineMedics helping an injured soldier at a frontline hospital.
Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images
Odesa, UkraineCommuting during a power cut.
Oleksandr Gimanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Kyiv, UkraineSheltering in a metro station during strikes.
Laura Boushnak for The New York Times
Here’s what we know:
After two days of drone attacks inside Russia, a State Department spokesman said the United States was not “enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.”
After two days of drone attacks inside Russia, a State Department spokesman said the United States was not “enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.”
www.nytimes.com
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Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, said the United States is not encouraging Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.Credit...Pool photo by Andrew Harnik
The United States is not encouraging Ukraine to attack Russian targets beyond its borders, a State Department spokesman said on Tuesday, after two days of what appeared to be Ukrainian drone strikes on military bases deep within Russian territory.
“We are not enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders. We are not encouraging Ukraine to strike beyond its borders,” Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, said at a daily news briefing. Drones struck an oil facility near an air base in Russia on Tuesday, a local official said, just a day after Ukraine used drones to
hit two military bases deep inside the country, one of the most brazen attacks of the nine-month-old war. The strikes inside Russian territory have raised fears that the war might escalate.
Washington has so far resisted requests from Kyiv to provide Ukraine with long-range weapons — like missiles and fighter jets — that would be capable of reaching deep into Russia.
Mr. Price cautioned that he was not aware of any official claims of responsibility for the drone attacks that have been widely attributed to Ukraine. He said that the United States is focused on the goal of helping Ukraine recover territory seized by Russian forces.
While Mr. Price stopped short of condemning Ukrainian attacks within Russia, his clear emphasis was on U.S. support for operations inside Ukraine’s borders.
“Everything we are doing, everything the world is doing to support Ukraine, is in support of Ukraine’s independence, its sovereignty, its territorial integrity,” Mr. Price said. “We are providing Ukraine with what it needs to use on its sovereign territory, on Ukrainian soil, to take on Russian aggressors.”
Asked at a Monday evening conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal whether the United States was concerned that strikes within Russia could escalate the conflict, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said America’s focus was on ensuring that Ukraine could defend itself and “take back territory that’s been seized from it since February 24th.”
It was unclear whether Mr. Blinken’s mention of the Feb. 24 lines was deliberate. Before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on that date, Russia already occupied much of the country’s eastern Donbas region, as well as Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, which the Kremlin annexed in 2014.
Asked on Tuesday whether the U.S. draws any distinction between Ukrainian land seized by Russia after its Feb. 24 invasion of the country and territory it was occupying previously, Mr. Price demurred.
“It’s a question for the Ukrainian government. It is not a question for the U.S. government,” he said.
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Michael Crowley
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0:22Drone Attacks Hit Russia for 2nd Straight Day
A blast at a Russian airfield came a day after Ukraine appeared to use drones to target two military bases deep inside Russia.CreditCredit...MIC Izvestia/IZ.RU via Reuters
KYIV, Ukraine — Drones struck an oil facility near an air base in Russia on Tuesday, a local official said, just a day after Ukraine appeared to use drones to
hit two military bases deep inside the country, one of the most brazen attacks of the nine-month-old war.
Ukraine has not explicitly claimed responsibility for the attacks on either day, following its practice regarding military actions inside Russia. Russian officials did not directly accuse Ukraine in Tuesday’s attack, which hit an oil depot in the Kursk region, 80 miles from the border.
But the back-to-back drone strikes over two days were widely seen as another sign of Kyiv’s willingness to bring the war closer to Moscow.
Ukraine’s attacks far inside Russia’s border have altered the geography of the war, showing holes in Moscow’s air defense and signaling a determination to make Russia pay a heavier price for its unrelenting assault on Ukraine’s civilians.
After Monday’s strikes, Russia launched
a volley of missiles at Ukraine that left half of the capital region of Kyiv without electricity and worsened rolling power outages across the country. Many Ukrainians have been without heat and water in frigid temperatures.
Monday’s attacks struck two military installations hundreds of miles inside the Russian border — the Engels airfield and the Dyagilevo military base — according to Russia’s Defense Ministry and a senior Ukrainian official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to convey sensitive information.
The drones were launched from Ukrainian territory, and in at least one of the strikes, Ukrainian special forces working near the base helped guide the drones to the target, the senior official said.
Yurii Ihnat, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, said that the damage to the airfield at Engels appeared minimal. “But it is an alarming signal for them,” he said on Ukrainian national television.
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An image released by the administration of the Kursk region of Russia on Tuesday showed smoke rising above the area near the Kursk airport.
Many of Ukraine’s Western allies have sought to avoid escalating the conflict and consistently declined to provide Kyiv with weapons that it could use to hit targets on Moscow’s territory. But Ukraine has shown that it is capable of developing its own arsenal. The Kremlin said that the attacks on Monday were carried out by Soviet-era jet drones.
Mick Ryan, a retired Australian Army officer, wrote on the Substack platform that the strikes on Monday had delivered “a psychological blow” to Russian people “who thought they were largely insulated from the effects of the war.” Dyagilevo lies about 100 miles from Moscow.
The Engels airfield has been a launching pad for bombers involved in missile attacks against Ukraine’s energy grid, Ukrainian officials say.
The Kursk airfield that was targeted on Tuesday is not thought to be as strategically significant, but since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February has been a base for fighter jets, according to Ukrainian intelligence reports.
Russian forces also have used positions in Kursk to launch attacks on the neighboring Sumy region of Ukraine with mortars, artillery and rocket launchers, said Dmytro Zhyvytsky, the head of the Sumy regional military administration.
On Monday, Mr. Zhyvytsky said, Russian forces near the border struck a monastery in Sumy with rockets, damaging the administrative building and other structures.
“Two cows were killed by shrapnel,” he said. “People survived.”
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Marc Santora,
Mike Ives and
Ivan Nechepurenko
The State of the War
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