Kyiv has landed several impressive blows against Russia in recent months -

Any day now the White House is expected to lift restrictions on Ukraine using US-supplied long-range missiles on Russian soil. Britain is expected to follow suit – not a moment too soon. And yet again, is it a question of Western support being too little too late to help Ukraine successfully turn the tide against Vladimir Putin’s invasion?

For more than a month now, Ukraine has kept an impressive foothold in the Russian region of Kursk. Kyiv claims to control approximately 1,000 sq km of Russian territory. Moscow has been forced to evacuate around 150,000 civilians. According to the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, up to 60,000 Russian troops have been redeployed from the Ukrainian front lines to fight in Kursk.

Kyiv has also landed several impressive blows on Russia over the past month with some of the largest, most widespread drone attacks since the beginning of the conflict.

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But there are fears that Ukraine might be losing momentum in its fight. Unconfirmed reports by Russian war bloggers began to emerge on Wednesday that Moscow has launched a “large scale” counter-attack in Kursk. Neither the Russian nor Ukrainian ministry of defence has so far confirmed these reports.

While certainly effective, Kyiv’s incursion has failed to sufficiently stretch Russia’s resources and weaken their advance inside Ukraine. Putin’s forces are continuing to edge forward around the city of Pokrovsk in Donbas, increasing the likelihood the Ukrainian army will soon have to retreat yet further.

As time goes on, it is hard not to view Ukraine’s stalling progress as being, in large part, down to the similarly stalling support from its Western allies. Zelensky has been petitioning the US, UK and Europe for permission to use Western-made long-range missiles to strike military targets on Russian soil for months. Over the past two and a half years, we have seen this pattern play out repeatedly over whether to even supply the long-range missiles in the first place, and before that tanks, F-16 jets and numerous financial aid packages.

Months of agonising by the US, Britain and European allies, such as Germany, force Ukraine to fight on at a disadvantage, only for the aid to finally be provided as the fighting shifts and Kyiv’s needs change in response.

There are several reasons why Western support for Ukraine is so halting. The first is that Kyiv’s allies are terrified that each fresh aid package or weapons supply might trigger a Russian escalation in the war that prompts Putin to push the nuclear button or drags other countries more directly into the conflict.

Public support for Ukraine has also waned in multiple countries thanks to this fear, which has in turn made it more difficult for politicians to convincingly make the case for sending more funding and weaponry to help Zelensky’s forces. 
With European estimates that Kyiv would need “hundreds of billions of dollars” in Western aid to drive Russian forces off its territory, Zelensky’s allies have reportedly been urging him to reconsider what kind of victory in the war would satisfy Ukraine.

This can’t go on. Kyiv’s Kursk invasion is the clearest proof yet that Putin’s repeated threats to use nuclear weapons against any onslaughts on Russian soil are nothing but hot air. Over a month into Ukraine’s incursion and meaningful retaliation by the Kremlin has failed to materialise. The West can afford to, and indeed must, be bigger and bolder in its support for Kyiv Only this way can the war in Ukraine be brought to a swift and just end, and peace in Europe restored.

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