Several reports have indicated the Biden administration is closing in on a decision to provide Army Tactical Missile System long-range artillery to Ukraine.
President Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a meeting this week the U.S. will provide a small number of long-range missiles, according to U.S. officials who spoke with NBC News.
But there is no clear timeline on when they might arrive or when an announcement might come.
The artillery system is known as ATACMS, generally pronounced as “attack-ems,” and is one of the most requested pieces of advanced weaponry from Kyiv.
The U.S. might provide Ukraine with ATACMS equipped with cluster bomblets instead of a single warhead, according to The Washington Post.
Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said the “number of missiles and the variant of ATACMS that will be delivered are both critical for understanding what type of battlefield effects we can expect to see.”
“Variants of the ATACMS have different ranges and are suitable for different types of targets,” Lee wrote on X.
If the U.S. follows through, Washington would follow suit after the U.K. and France in providing Ukraine with long-range missiles.
The ATACMS are highly coveted, however, because they can strike up to 190 miles away, which would allow Ukraine to strike deeper into Russian-occupied territory.
If approved, the weapons delivery would be a remarkable turn-around after the Biden administration declined to send them to Ukraine over fears of a wider war with Russia or depleting the U.S. military’s own arsenal.
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said just this week the U.S. is still considering the weapons.
“They have not been taken off the table,” he said on Fox News.
Read the full report at TheHill.com.
