New U.S. weapons expected to keep Ukraine in the fight
The $300 million in new weaponry that the United States is sending to Ukraine, the first aid package in months, will help Ukraine hold off Russian troops for a few weeks, analysts say, but it will not change the overall situation on the battlefield, where Moscow currently has the advantage.
Ukraine has long said that it would lose more ground to Russia unless it received more weapons and ammunition, but a robust $60 billion aid package has been bottled up in the House for months by conservative Republican lawmakers. That has left front-line Ukrainian troops vulnerable to long-distance glide bombs dropped from Russian aircraft and intense artillery attacks.
American military support for Ukraine dried up in late December, and the White House has been looking ever since for ways to circumvent the logjam in the House. The new package, announced Tuesday, does that by drawing on cost savings in Pentagon contracts.
The package will provide Ukraine with an array of desperately needed weapons. These include Stinger missiles to target aircraft, which Russia has increasingly used to support ground assaults, artillery rounds to keep attacking Russian troops at bay and anti-tank weapons to repel mechanized assaults.
“This ammunition will keep Ukraine's guns firing for a period, but only a short period,” said Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser. “It is nowhere near enough to meet Ukraine's battlefield needs, and it will not prevent Ukraine from running out of ammunition.”
The $300 million in military aid announced Tuesday pales in comparison to previous multibillion-dollar packages sent by the United States.
“These are sums that are spent in a matter of weeks,” said Serhii Kuzan, the chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a nongovernmental research group. He added that the impact of the new package would be “minimal.”
With additional American aid now in doubt, European leaders have been scrambling to offer more support to Ukraine and respond to its most pressing needs.
Most recently, the Czech Republic began an initiative to scour the world for available shells, buy them and send them to Ukraine. Prague has located 800,000 artillery rounds, and it said last week that it had raised enough funding from European allies to purchase a first batch of 300,000.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's foreign minister, said Wednesday that the first batch would arrive “in the foreseeable future.” He added that Ukraine was working with allies on two similar initiatives.