Russia fires missiles at Ukraine after Kyiv's first use of long-range American missiles inside Russia

Russia launched a barrage of missiles at Ukraine Thursday in its first major retaliation for Ukraine's attack earlier in the week on a military facility in the Russian region of Bryansk. That strike saw the Ukrainians use American-made and supplied long-range missiles known as ATACMS, which President Biden had given the Ukrainian forces permission to fire deeper into Russian territory only two days earlier.

Moscow had warned the U.S. and its NATO allies for months against granting Ukraine permission to fire Western missiles into Russia, and Mr. Biden's weekend decision to permit such strikes drew stark new warnings from lawmakers and Russian media close to President Vladimir Putin that the U.S. was escalating the nearly three-year conflict at the risk of sparking a new world war.

The U.S. and its allies have argued that it's Putin escalating the war he started by ordering the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, including by deploying more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers to bolster his own forces in recent weeks. But there was little doubt that Moscow would respond to the Ukrainians' first use of the American ATACMS to strike inside Russia somehow, and air raid sirens blared across the country Wednesday as the U.S. closed its embassy in Kyiv and warned of a possible imminent "significant air attack."