Missile diplomacy No shortage of risks in giving blessing to escalated strikes

Antony Blinken and David Lammy's joint trip to Kyiv, to be followed by Keir Starmer's trip to Washington to see Joe Biden tomorrow, has inevitably lifted expectations that Ukraine will finally be given permission to fire Anglo-French Storm Shadow and US Atacms missiles with their 190-mile-plus range into Russia. There is no shortage of risks.

- Dan Sabbagh

Allowing Ukraine the ability to fire western-made weapons deep into Russia could have a dramatic political impact on the course of a war mired in a grim, attritional slog that appears to be favouring Moscow, its forces bearing down on the strategic town of Pokrovsk.

Blinken and Lammy provided a potential justification for the missile escalation on Tuesday, calling out Iran for supplying a first batch of short-range, highspeed Fath-360 ballistic missiles to Russia, a step up from the slower Shahed drones it had given Moscow until now. Russia was likely to use the missiles "within weeks", Blinken warned.

The Fath-360 missiles have a range of about 75 miles, according to the US. They could be used to strike Ukrainian cities close to the frontline such as Kharkiv or Zaporizhzhia, or Sloviansk and Kramatorsk in the Donbas, and even theoretically Kyiv, and would allow Russia to use its own stock of longer-range cruise and ballistic missiles to attack targets elsewhere in Ukraine.

The missile war follows a logic of inventories, with Russia's goal being to exhaust Ukraine's air defences. Kyiv has already run out of short-range Buk and S-300 systems, which left its power stations defenceless earlier this year.