
President Trump has signaled the United States may send long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, allowing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to strike military targets deep inside Russia. The Kremlin has warned this move would escalate tensions between Moscow and Washington.
Trump suggested this week that Tomahawks would be a central point of discussion when Zelensky visits Friday to meet with Trump for the third time in Washington.
“I know what he has to say. He wants weapons. He would like to have Tomahawks. Everyone else wants to, and we have a lot of Tomahawks,” Trump told reporters Tuesday at the White House.
The missiles, designed to fly at high subsonic speeds and at low altitudes to better evade radars would provide Kyiv with a lot more range and capability to hit Russian military targets and energy facilities, such as oil and gas infrastructure, experts told The Hill this week.
The Tomahawks, which the U.S. began developing in the 1970s and were first fired by the U.S. military during in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, can have a range up to 1,000 miles, depending on the variant.
The munitions have a far greater range than the guided Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), which former President Biden’s administration gave to Ukraine in 2023. ATACMS have a range up to 190 miles.
“There's a huge number of potential targets that Ukraine could hit. It could continue the strike campaign against oil refineries and do even more damage against them, which definitely would hurt Russia,” said Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst and co-founder of Finland-based Black Bird Group, which closely tracks the Russia-Ukraine war.
Kastehelmi added that Ukraine could target Russia’s command elements, electric warfare stations, air bases, logistical hubs and other locations, which “would then be a new headache for” Moscow.
Zelensky previously said Ukraine would use the munitions, which can fly at speeds greater than 500 mph and carry explosives, only for military purposes and not target civilians, should the U.S. provide them.
“These missiles would be used to strike high-value military targets currently out of reach, such as the naval base in Novorossiysk, and key airbases like Olenya in Murmansk Oblast, which Russia uses as a main launchpad for mass missile attacks against Ukrainian cities,” Vladyslav Sobolevskyi, the co-founder of Snake Island Institute, a Ukrainian group trying to bolster ties with the U.S. armed forces, told The Hill on Wednesday.
Russia has said the introduction of Tomahawk missiles would further escalate the conflict, which has been ongoing for roughly 3 1/2 years. Russia’s former President Dmitry Medvedev warned Monday that the U.S. potentially supplying Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv could “end badly” for everyone, including Trump.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said this week that such a delivery could “escalate” the conflict into a “nuclear” war and claimed that Trump is not in a rush to dispatch the long-range munitions.
Military analysts disagreed, saying the risks of escalation have been “overblown” throughout the war and that Putin still wants to avoid a direct conflict with the U.S. and NATO.
“The Tomahawks would improve Ukraine’s long range strike capability, but they are not a wonder weapon. And they likely will only be effective with extensive Western flight planning and assistance. The U.S. can therefore control escalation risk by vetting the potential deep targets in Russia,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the defense program at the think tank Center for a New American Security.
Kastehelmi, the military analyst at Black Bird Group, argued it is “difficult” for Russia to escalate the war further, so the “actions would likely be asymmetrical and directed towards the West.”
“On the other hand, it is difficult to assess which actions would be specifically due to the Tomahawks and which are related to the otherwise tense general situation and other military aid provided to Ukraine,” he added.
Military experts said the potential U.S. supply of Tomahawks, which are typically launched from U.S. Navy ships and submarines, would not be a “game changer” for Ukraine, but it would further enrich Ukraine’s existing arsenal of long-range missiles, already consisted of Flamingo cruise and Neptune anti-ship missiles.
“What this might offer is larger numbers and, therefore, give them additional leverage and attacks on the Russian energy facilities, like refineries. That's probably Ukraine's greatest lever for getting the Russians to negotiate,” Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview with The Hill. “They're not going to do it on the ground. They just don't have the ability to hurt the Russians enough.”
Kastehelmi said Tomahawks would force Russia to make some “adaptations,” as the Kremlin would not know early on how Ukraine would use the missiles.
“Of course, then maybe rearrange and prioritize its missile defenses, but Russia is already struggling with the drone strikes,” he said. “So even though the interception rate of drones is slightly high, Ukraine can still get through and hit the refineries.”
The U.S. military has fired more than 2,300 Tomahawks during combat operations, including in Libya and Syria, since 1991, according to the Navy. More recently, the U.S. and the United Kingdom’s navies fired Tomahawk missiles against Houthi rebels in Yemen last year.
Cancian, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, estimated that the Pentagon’s current stockpile of Tomahawks is about 4,000 missiles, but that includes “some obsolete missiles that the Ukrainians might be able to use.”
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.
Trump said he knows Zelensky wants to argue for the U.S. to supply more weaponry during the forthcoming meeting in the Oval Office.
“They would like to go offensive, you know that, and we will have to make that determination,” the president told reporters at the White House on Wednesday.
When reached for comment, the White House referred The Hill to Trump’s remarks Tuesday.
Ukraine will need at least a “couple of hundred” Tomahawks to conduct a sustained bombing campaign, because a few dozen missiles “wouldn't really make a very heavy impact,” according to Kastehelmi.
If supplied with Tomahawks, Ukraine would have to use ground launchers to use fire the missiles, experts said.
“Although Tomahawk was developed as a naval system, and it launched from sea, there are ground-based launchers. The Marine Corps developed some and built some,” Cancian said. “And now they're actually deactivating those units so they could actually send those to Ukraine. So there's no problem making them ground launched.”
Tomahawk missiles are produced by defense contractor Raytheon.
The Ukrainian delegation arrived in the U.S. this week, ahead of the Oval Office meeting.
Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, part of the group, wrote in a post on Telegram and social platform X, “Their technologies save lives: F-16s and modern air defense systems protect Ukrainian skies, and their offensive solutions reliably support our forces at the front.”