“Be reasonable.” After Joe Biden’s administration authorized Ukrainian forces to use long-range US missiles to attack targets inside Russia this week, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, urged Moscow not to overreact. Russian authorities asserted that the strikes using ATACMS missiles must have relied on direct US operational involvement, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke of a “qualitative” shift in the war — hinting that it could even push Moscow toward the use of nuclear weapons. Macron’s call for “reason” was hardly reassuring. It rests on the hope that, contrary to past claims about the Russian leadership’s “madness,” it might quietly refrain from incinerating more Ukrainians, or others, in response.

ATACMS — ludicrously pronounced “attack ’ems” — strikes on Russian territory have been narrowly presented by Biden administration officials as a tactical shift, in response to the reported mobilization of North Korean soldiers to dislodge Ukrainian troops from Russia’s Kursk Oblast. This is not convincing. Biden long cast such strikes as a line not to be crossed in provoking Russian retaliation — a posture now dropped at the tail end of his tenure. This move is also clearly about the transition from one US administration to the next: in Anatol Lieven’s terms, either forcing Donald Trump not to abandon Ukraine or, seen in a more benign light, attempting to strengthen Ukraine’s hand in expected peace talks.

Reports on Thursday of Russia’s use of an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) against Ukraine undermined any idea that the Biden administration’s policy would chasten Vladimir Putin, instead hinting at what the Russian military is capable of, fortunately not yet with a nuclear payload. The idea that Ukraine’s negotiating position is being bolstered also seems far from reality. Speaking to Fox on Wednesday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stepped back from his previous defiant stance on the need to drive Russian troops from all Ukrainian territory, commenting that “dozens of thousands of our people could not perish” for the sake of Crimea. Annexed in 2014, the peninsula can, he said, be recovered through “diplomacy” — in effect, kicking the prospect into the long grass.