US reportedly mulls tapping arms stockpile to assist Kyiv
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is considering whether to provide Ukraine with badly needed arms and ammunition from Pentagon stockpiles even though the government has run out of money to replace those munitions, according to two U.S. officials and a senior lawmaker.
Such a move would be a short-term measure to help tide over Ukraine’s armed forces until Congress breaks a monthslong impasse and approves a larger military aid package to the country, the officials said.
But in considering whether to tap into the Pentagon stockpiles again, the administration is weighing both the political risks and questions about U.S. military readiness.
“It’s something that I know is on the table,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., who leads the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. Reed, who recently returned from a trip to Ukraine, said he would support such a stopgap measure in “incremental uses to buy time.”
The United States has provided Ukraine with some $44.2 billion in military aid since Russia launched its full-scale invasion two years ago.
About half that amount has been sent under what is called presidential drawdown authority. That allows the administration to immediately transfer Pentagon stocks to Ukraine instead of waiting the several months or years it can take for defense contractors to manufacture weapons under new contracts. The last shipment was in December.
The administration still has authority from Congress to draw down
about $4 billion worth of weapons and ammunition. But it exhausted a separate fund in December that replenished munitions the United States had donated to Ukraine. Pentagon and White House officials have said since then that they were not prepared to risk U.S. military readiness to dip into Defense Department stockpiles without being able to replace them.
That thinking is changing, mainly because of Ukraine’s increasingly dire predicament on the battlefield. Outmanned and outgunned, Ukrainian ground forces are running out of artillery, air defense weaponry and other munitions, Western officials and analysts say, and they are in perhaps their most precarious position since the opening months of the war.
In mid-February, Ukraine withdrew from the eastern city of Avdiivka, the country’s first major battlefield loss since the fall of Bakhmut last year. The Biden administration blamed the retreat on the failure by Congress to provide additional money to support Ukraine’s war effort.
The Senate passed an emergency aid bill including $60.1 billion for Ukraine.
But the measure faces an uncertain fate in the House of Representatives, where Speaker Mike Johnson has indicated that he does not intend to put it to a vote.
Some officials fear that drawing down Defense Department inventories now would take the pressure off Congress to act on the longer-term $60 billion aid package.
It would also expose the administration to criticism from Republican opponents of aid to Ukraine that such a move without replenishing Pentagon stocks would hurt the United States at a time of hostilities in the Middle East and growing tensions with China.
Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin of Russia said the West faced the prospect of nuclear conflict if it intervened more directly in the war in Ukraine, using a speech to the nation Thursday to escalate his threats against Europe and the U.S.
Putin alluded to comments by President Emmanuel Macron of France this week raising the possibility of sending troops from NATO countries to Ukraine. Macron’s remarks drew quick rebukes from other Western officials, who have ruled out such deployments.