After Great Britain, France. By delivering long-range Scalp missiles, called Storm Shadow across the Channel, to Kiev, Paris in turn provides Ukraine with a deep strike capability. This cruise missile, jointly developed by the two countries, is launched from a fighter plane. London had already announced in May that it would deliver it to the Ukrainian forces. Russia claimed a few days later to have intercepted a Storm Shadow in the context of the conflict in Ukraine. A French military source assured this Tuesday, July 11 that the Scalp were already on the ground. They “were delivered at the same time as our president announced it,” said this source to AFP, on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Vilnius.
In a war whose front has remained extremely stable since last winter, despite the successive offensive will of Russian and Ukrainian forces, this cruise missile allows President Volodymyr Zelensky’s army to strike well beyond the line head on. It has a range of more than 250 kilometers, more than any other weapons supplied to Kiev by Western countries, giving it access to areas in the east of the country now controlled by the Russians. “It’s essential for Ukrainian forces to disrupt logistics and Russian command and control,” Ivan Klyszcz, a researcher at the International Center for Defense and Security (ICDS) in Estonia, told AFP. This capability will feed into the “current approach” of the Ukrainian forces, which are trying to “move slowly to protect their forces and reduce their losses as much as possible”.
The Storm Shadow / SCALP missile
© / afp.com/Gal ROMA, Laurence SAUBADU
“Make the difference”
With these missiles in particular, “a few fighter planes operating from safe airspace can make the difference”, explained to AFP in June Dylan Lehrke, analyst of the private British intelligence company Janes. “Russian forces can deny Ukrainian aircraft access to space above the territories they control, but they have not been able to defend against deep strikes.” kyiv, in fact, has been calling for them for a long time, but Westerners have been very hesitant, as for fighter planes. In May, commenting on the British announcement, the New York think-tank Soufan Center noted that “the Western refusal to supply long-range missiles was based on the fear that Ukraine could strike beyond the occupied Ukrainian territories, in Russia itself, thereby substantially escalating the conflict.”
With these missiles, the headquarters of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea, located in Sevastopol, Crimea, is now within range of fire from the Ukrainians, as well as several Russian cities near the border, underlined this note from the think-tank new -yorkers, specializing in security issues. But London has insisted that these missiles should “enable Ukraine to repel Russian forces based on the sovereign territory of Ukraine”, in the words of British Defense Minister Ben Wallace.
In the same way, even if Paris in turn “breaks the taboo” of long range, in the words of Ivan Klyszcz, it reminds us of the fundamental strategic limits of use. The Scalp missiles will be delivered “keeping the clarity, the coherence of our doctrine, that is to say allowing Ukraine to defend its territory”, recalled Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, thus implicitly excluding any use to strike Russia.