Source: Election results are from The Associated Press.

By The New York Times election results team: Michael Andre, Emma Baker, Neil Berg, Andrew Chavez, Michael Beswetherick, Matthew Bloch, Lily Boyce, Irineo Cabreros, Nico Chilla, Nate Cohn, Alastair Coote, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Leo Dominguez, Tiff Fehr, Andrew Fischer, Martín González Gómez, Joyce Ho, Will Houp, Jon Huang, Junghye Kim, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Jasmine C. Lee, Joey K. Lee, Vivian Li, Alex Lemonides, Ilana Marcus, Alicia Parlapiano, Jaymin Patel, Dan Simmons-Ritchie, Charlie Smart, Jonah Smith, Urvashi Uberoy, Isaac White and Christine Zhang

Additional contributions by Grace Ashford, Luke Broadwater, Mathew Brownstein, Amanda Cordero Kenan Davis, Karoun Demirjian, Robert Draper, Catie Edmondson, Nick Fandos, Lalena Fisher, Patrick Hays, Robert Jimison, Annie Karni, Maya Miller, Julie Walton Shaver, Jaime Tanner, Tracey Tully, Lisa Waananen Jones and Jessica White

Edited by Wilson Andrews, Lindsey Rogers Cook, William P. Davis, Jonathan Ellis, Thomas Gaffney, Amy Hughes, Ben Koski, Allison McCartney and Rachel Shorey

Source: Election results are from The Associated Press.

It has taken an election defeat in the US and the arrival of 10,000 North Koreans in Ukraine for Joe Biden to finally relent. After two years of asking, Ukraine’s army has been given permission to use US long-range Atacms missiles to strike against targets inside Russia. The military and political consequences remain uncertain.

Russia has been able to bomb targets across all of Ukraine throughout the war. On Sunday it attacked key sites across the country’s power network, forcing Kyiv to implement national electricity rationing as a result of the damage caused. Some missiles were aimed as far west as Lviv and at sites near the border with Moldova, and an energy crisis is closer as a result.

Kyiv did not have a significant long-range missile programme before the full-scale Russian invasion and has been hamstrung by its western backers ever since. The US, UK and France may have donated long-range missiles but they have only allowed them to be used against targets inside Ukraine’s internationally recognised borders – meaning that key airfields, fuel depots, logistics sites and barracks in Russia had remained beyond the reach of Ukraine, except through drone attacks.

White House leaks to US media on Sunday night indicate that Biden, with two months of his presidency left to run, has given permission for Atacms missiles, which have a range of 190 miles (300km), to be used inside Russia. However, there is an apparent qualification: they must be used in relation to the battle in Kursk oblast. There, Russia, with the help of North Korea, has massed about 50,000 troops and is aiming to snuff out Ukraine’s three-month incursion.

“Reading the tea leaves, unfortunately this looks like more incrementalism,” said George Barros, a Ukraine expert at the US Institute for the Study of War. “It looks like the US wants the Atacms missiles to be used precisely against the North Koreans in Kursk, yet there is a large volume of meaningful Russian support infrastructure in locations such as Rostov, Belgorod and Vorenezh.”

Though there have been no Atacms missile attacks inside Russia recorded yet, some effects are expected to be immediate. Russian military planners are likely to move anything they believe is at risk out of range if they can do so fast enough.

That may be good value for the US also given that Atacms stockpiles are not plentiful and the missiles, at a cost of somewhere between $1m and$2m, are not cheap.

There may also be a value in directly threatening North Korea, whose entry into the war is hugely significant, Barros said. “So far the western response has been lacklustre, and there are reports that North Korea may be willing to send as many as 100,000 to fight against Ukraine.” With Russia and Ukraine’s combat forces considered very roughly matched at somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000, dissuading North Korea from sending more troops could be significant.

With a Donald Trump presidency looming, Ukraine also badly needs an opportunity to show what it can do, with western help, on the battlefield. “The Ukrainians need to convince the incoming US administration that they are still worth backing – in Trump’s transactional view, a ‘good investment’,” argued Matthew Savill, of the Royal United Services Institute thinktank.

In response, the west has to contend with Russian threats of escalation, though the reality of the Ukraine war is that, as Savill points out, Moscow “has already escalated”. Russia is already engaged in a heightened sabotage campaign across Europe, with assassination plots targeting western arms makers and arson plots, including sending incendiary devices via the DHL network to the UK.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the attacks on power plants and substations primarily affect civilians, particularly when electricity is lost. “Russia’s strategy of escalating attacks, especially around holidays or weekends, is intended to break the spirit of Ukrainians and remind them of the hardships of war,” said Vladyslav Faraponov, the head of the board of Ukraine’s Institute of American Studies.

However, few experts believe that even allowing Ukraine to use Atacms more broadly inside Russia will have a decisive military effect. The US permission may well be followed by the UK, France and Italy agreeing to donate more of their Storm Shadow/Scalp missiles, which have a similar range, and allowing them to be used inside Russia. But again, stocks are limited, even if permission is given by the Europeans and the US, which provides a guidance system on which the missile relies.

Ukraine remains under serious pressure in the east, with Russian forces threatening to form a pocket that would encircle Kurakhove in the south. Though Russian casualties are running at record levels of about 1,500 a day, as the Kremlin tries to persuade Trump and his team that its victory is inevitable with constant frontline attacks, Ukraine is also short on personnel numbers and has never obtained decisive western support at any point during the war.

“Over time, Ukrainians have learned to live with initial refusals on the delivery or use of critical weapons, followed by hesitant ‘maybes’, and only after countless lives are lost, a reluctant ‘yes’. Unfortunately, this reactive approach is not what Ukraine needs to preserve its independence or endure potential negotiations,” Faraponov said.

A late decision to loosen restrictions on one missile type is not obviously the kind of decisive support that Ukraine hopes for either.

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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world

We all know the slogan. But Donald Trump will not make America great again by waging war on his domestic enemies. Instead Trump’s vengeance campaign threatens the real foundations of American greatness.

The American military, the country’s leading universities, the Federal Reserve, the justice system, the free press, the scientific establishment, even the health of American citizens are all at risk. The president-elect has nominated vengeful crackpots to key positions and promised to let people like Robert F Kennedy Jr “go wild”.

The damage that Trump’s policies could inflict on America will delight the country’s real enemies in Moscow and Beijing. They know from their own histories that when a nation turns on itself, its international power can collapse.

Trump’s Maga shock troops believe that they can only make their country great again by first destroying their internal enemies. Trump has said the “enemy from within” is “more dangerous” than Russia and China. His appointees are willing to turn America’s institutions upside down in the pursuit of vengeance.

Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee as defence secretary, has written that “sometimes the fight must begin with a struggle against domestic enemies”. In a podcast, he demanded: “Any general, any admiral . . . that was involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programmes or woke shit has got to go.”

Reports are already circulating that Trump plans to establish a “warrior board” empowered to force out senior military officers, replacing them with loyalists. His team are also reportedly considering court-martialling some military leaders for their roles in the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In his first term, Trump was enraged when “his” generals insisted that their loyalty was to the constitution, not to him personally. Senior officers resisted Trump’s demands for the deployment of troops on American streets in the Black Lives Matter protests.

This time Trump will want absolute obedience from his newly promoted corporals and colonels, particularly if he intends to deploy the military to carry out the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. But purging your most senior generals can leave a country vulnerable and its military confused.

America’s intelligence services are also at risk. Trump’s nominee for the job of director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is noted for her sympathy for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin in Russia. She has consistently echoed Russian propaganda, suggesting that Nato expansion was responsible for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and that the US was running secret bio-labs inside Ukraine. Her appointment will cause consternation among American allies, Britain foremost among them, which routinely share intelligence with the US.

American science and medicine lead the world. But Trump proposes to put a conspiracy theorist in charge of the health and human services department. Even the Trump-supporting New York Post concluded, after meeting Robert F Kennedy Jr, that he was “nuts on a lot of fronts”. If RFK imposes his vaccine hostility on the US as a whole, he will sow the seeds of future epidemics.

Seven of the world’s top 10 universities are in the US. But America’s institutes of learning are also on Trump’s enemies list. His allies claim that the universities are bastions of “wokeness” and antisemitism. Bill Ackman, a Trump-supporting financier, recently opined that Yale was “no different than Hamas”. The attack on wokeness can be used as a battering ram to try to cow the universities into submission on a wider range of issues. Over time, America could see a threat to the intellectual liberty on which great universities depend.

Press freedom, something that truly distinguishes America from its autocratic rivals, is also menaced. Trump has filed a series of lawsuits against media outlets that have displeased him — a favourite tactic of authoritarian regimes.

Trump regards independent institutions of any sort as a threat. There is widespread speculation that his administration will attempt to sack Jay Powell, head of the Federal Reserve. Powell has reminded journalists that Trump is “not permitted under law” to force him out.

But Trump has his own ideas about the rule of law. Matt Gaetz, his nominee for attorney-general, was under investigation by his Republican colleagues for alleged ethics violations that include having sex with a minor. Gaetz, who has denied the allegations, claims to believe that he, like Trump is the victim of a politicised justice system. Other close confidants of Trump, like Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, have recently emerged from prison.

These are angry men, who may be intent on revenge. They could use the justice system to go after their enemies. That will be bad news not just for the individuals who get caught up in the witch hunt, but for the whole country.

American greatness is founded on the rule of law. That is a fundamental reason why foreigners trust American assets and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If Trump uses the justice system to go after his enemies — and to reward his billionaire cronies — then investors could rightly take fright.

Rather than making America great again, Trump’s assault on US institutions will make America more like Russia and China. Putin and Xi Jinping will benefit. Americans and America’s allies will suffer the consequences.

gideon.rachman@ft.com