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But it has amplified fears in the region, and in the United States, that a miscalculation could drastically widen the war. Thousands of U.S. troops have been sent to Poland and other country’s along the alliance’s eastern edge, and President Biden and other Western leaders have maintained that a Russian attack on one would invite a ferocious response.
The senior U.S. defense official said Russia’s fusillade targeting the International Peacekeeping and Security Center has not altered the U.S. force posture in Poland. The official said that “more than a couple dozen” missiles were launched.
The facility has been used in the past by U.S. and NATO troops to provide training for the Ukrainian military, and currently houses about 1,000 foreign volunteers who have traveled to Ukraine to aid in its war with Russia. The senior defense official said the Pentagon would “not have a way of knowing or tracking” whether any American citizens were among those killed or wounded in the attack, though he affirmed earlier statements indicating that no U.S. troops, government officials or defense contractors were at Yavoriv when the strike occurred.
The facility is not a transit point for aid, the senior U.S. defense official said, contradicting Russian Defense Ministry claims the base was used as a weapons and equipment depot. U.S. and European officials have not disclosed any shipment routes into Ukraine, so it is unclear whether the facility had been a hub for weapons in the past.
Russian officials have warned that they consider Western weapons shipments “legitimate targets.”
That the attack originated in Russian airspace underscored the limitations of enforcing a no-fly zone in Ukraine, the senior defense official said. The Biden administration has refused repeated pleas from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and some U.S. lawmakers who support using American warplanes to police the airspace. Others in Congress concur with the Pentagon’s assessment that such an operation would risk a direct confrontation between U.S. and Russian aircraft.
“A no-fly zone would not stop all of the air activity,” the senior defense official said Monday. “It would engender U.S. pilots in combat with Russia.”
Western Ukraine and its major city of Lviv has become a transit point for civilians fleeing the war elsewhere in the country, but recent strikes have shattered the notion it will remain a refuge from attacks.
“This is the third now military facility or airfield that the Russians have struck in western Ukraine in just the last couple of days,” the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, John Kirby, said Sunday. “So clearly, at least from an airstrike perspective, they’re broadening their target sets.”
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