These are ATACMS and Stormshadow missiles supplied by the US and UK and France and so on to Ukraine. They are long range. They are made in the west and shipped in regularly. And importantly their launchers are known to be crewed by literal NATO soldiers from those countries. The targeting data and intelligence for their targets is supplied via US intelligence networks from US spy satellites.
The point is to use these weapons to like destroy an apartment building in Moscow and terrorize civilians. The point is to blow up a train station full of civilians. They might also hit some rear line Russian stuff like airfields I guess but mostly soft targets IMO.
They literally have been unable to use them for attacking deep into Russia because the US has said no and they control the missiles, both the supply and the people doing the firing and the people supplying necessary targeting data.
So they kind of are sitting on a cache of weapons, nicer missiles which are harder to intercept, which travel further, which are more evasive, etc. It won’t alter the course of the war but will impose a higher cost on Russia which has been the goal of the US all along, to bleed Russia, to weaken them, to sap their interest in further entanglements and make the Russian public and leadership war-weary and wary of standing up to the west in future.
All this said, a problem with Putin is he’s always talking big then backing down which unfortunately just encourages the west to continue to push these lines. If you’re constantly threatening but not backing it up you start to lack credibility and others look for ways to salami-slice their way to backing you into a corner. Which is inherently dangerous and likely to lead to nuclear war.
He’s really, really not a confrontational guy or a tough guy in these terms. I mean he got played for 8 years with fake peace talks as things continued to escalate before finally acting and even that act was at first just an attempt to intimidate Ukraine into surrender by going for Kiev but not actually trying to take it so much as apply pressure which resulted in an offensive that had to retreat later when the peace talks were predictably sabotaged by the UK.
In their opinion it doesn’t matter.
Firstly because either the US is going to war with China within the next 8 years or it’s not happening because the US would be at such a disadvantage and like all bullies they won’t pick a fight with an evenly matched opponent. Secondly because military drone systems used by the US are not really like those used by other countries. For example, Russia and Ukraine are using near off the shelf kit and standing in a field while US drones are controlled from a bunker or command shack or place on a US navy ship from a system that looks like it’s from a Dave and Busters racing game with the whole big seat, multiple monitors, joy-stick and additional controls. US is just not interested in that kind of drone warfare. They’ve gone all in on the idea of semi-autonomous “AI” systems and swarms controlled by 1-2 trained people per swarm from a great distance. Thirdly the US has long had this image of it’s military as this highly trained, highly disciplined, elite force while simultaneously seeing Russians/Chinese as “hordes” of under-trained, under-motivated, under-equipped canon fodder so they turn up their nose to certain types of tactics as being for those others.
Fourth, the US is worried about domestic insurrection and discontent over worsening economic conditions. The worse thing you want to do in that situation is empower the ordinary people to wage insurrection using the type of tactics and methods (drones) field-proven by unconventional militias and militant groups across the middle east. These types of drones and easy cheap access to them is also a nightmare for operational security of military bases and internal security forces operations.
Unironically the US wants and is working hard on killbots they can fire and forget for attacks and area denial. They know among other things they can’t fight China navy to navy over Taiwan so instead the plan shifts to this idea of naval and aerial drones, semi-autonomous that are basically killbots or self-propelled targeting mines that they’d unleash in the hundreds and thousands in the straits to deny China the ability to send landing craft or support ships near Taiwan and buy them time to hold the island and strike at and destroy China’s navy from beyond the horizon. This is actually not a bad answer to the problem of traditional mining that mine-sweeper ships can just clear an area, mine-sweepers don’t work if the mines actively hone in on and swarm your clearing ship when you get anywhere near any of them.
The US military is not agile in the way the Russian military or the Ukrainian bandits are. It’s a big, expensive, lumbering machine and that’s the way they like it and that’s the way it’s going to be because it produces more profit for Raytheon and because it suits their self-image.
The real losers are local EMS, fire, cops, even the FBI who get hit in the budget much harder acquiring drones now.