Although no official announcement had been made by the White House, Dmitry Peskov said the Russian government had taken note of media reports on Sunday that Biden had gone back on his policy of refusing to grant permission.
"If such a decision has been taken, it means a whole new spiral of tension and a whole new situation with regard to U.S. involvement in this conflict," the BBC quoted Dmitry Peskov as saying.
A Kremlin statement issued on Monday said that if missiles provided by the U.S. were used against targets inside Russia, Moscow would view the attack as coming not from Ukraine but from the U.S. itself, the BBC reported.
The statement said Russia and Putin had made their position clear and that the latest decision marked a new level of U.S. involvement in the war.
Vladimir Putin said in September that Moscow would see such a loosening of restrictions as “direct involvement of NATO countries” in the war.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, gave a cautious response to reports of the policy change, saying “strikes are not carried out with words” and that the “missiles will speak for themselves.”
U.S. media widely reported on Sunday that President Joe Biden had changed tack on the policy of using U.S.-provided weapons to strike deep inside Russia. He had previously refused to grant Kyiv permission to do this despite repeated requests.
"This is a very important decision for us," Serhiy Kuzan, chairman of the Kyiv-based Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre, told the BBC. "It’s not something that will change the course of the war, but I think it will make our forces more equal."
The New York Times reported that the permission was limited to strikes within Russia’s southwestern Kursk region, into which Ukraine launched an incursion in August and to where North Korean forces have now apparently been deployed.
Kursk is seen as the likely focus of Ukrainian strikes, though the theater of operations may expand, the NYT wrote.
Reacting to reports that the new policy applied only to the Kursk region, the president of the Kyiv School of Economics, Tomofiy Mylovonov, was dismissive.
"U.S. logic is that such strikes will stop Pyongyang from sending more soldiers," he posted on LinkedIn. "I think it is a delusion and won’t work. If Putin considers Russians expendable, then Kim Jong-un certainly does as well."
The permission is believed to extend only to ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System), short-range missiles made by Lockheed Martin with a range of around 300 kilometers. Kyiv has been pushing for months for the green light to use ATACMS inside Russia, and Biden’s change of policy is seen as a response to Russia’s deployment of North Korean soldiers.
The move will pave the way for London and Paris to grant Kyiv consent to use their long-range Storm Shadow missiles for strikes within Russia, something Ukraine has also long been requesting.
Overnight assault
Sunday’s news came as Russia launched one of its biggest aerial assaults on Ukraine since the start of the war. Zelenskyy said in his nightly TV address that Russia had launched 210 drones and missiles, including hypersonic Kinzhal rockets.
The president added that most of the weapons, which were aimed at energy and other critical infrastructure, had been intercepted.
“And this is the answer to all those who wanted to achieve something with Putin through conversations, phone calls, hugs—appeasement,” he said, in an apparent reference to a telephone call between Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, and Putin late last week.
“His language is treachery... Time should be invested not in talking to someone in Moscow but in really forcing Russia to end the war.”
Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, echoed Zelesnkyy’s sentiments in an X post on Sunday:
"President Biden responded to the entry of North Korean troops into the war and the massive Russian missile strike in a language that Putin understands — by lifting restrictions on Ukraine's use of Western missiles," he wrote. “The victim of aggression has the right to defend itself. Strength deters, weakness provokes."
Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, described the development as “a very important change.”
“This fundamentally changes the situation on the front,” Duda said. “I believe that this decision by President Joe Biden was very necessary, and it’s good that it was given... It’s a very important, maybe even a breakthrough moment in this war.”
