New weapons can’t come fast enough for Ukraine
On April 28, as Russia put pressure on Ukrainian forces across a 600-mile front line, Ukraine received a shipment of antiarmor rockets, missiles and badly needed 155 mm artillery shells. It was the first installment from the $61 billion in military aid that President Joe Biden had approved just four days earlier.
A second batch of those weapons and ammunition arrived Monday. And a fresh supply of Patriot interceptor missiles from Spain arrived in Poland on Tuesday. They would be at the Ukrainian front soon, a senior Spanish official said.
The push is on to move weapons to a depleted Ukrainian army that is back on its heels and desperate for aid. Over the past week, a flurry of planes, trains and trucks have arrived at NATO depots in Europe carrying ammunition and smaller weapon systems to be shipped across Ukraine’s borders.
“Now we need to move fast, and we are,” Biden said April 24 when he signed the bill approving the aid. He added, “I’m making sure the shipments start right away.”
But it may prove difficult for Biden and other NATO allies to maintain the urgency. Weapons pledged by the United States, Britain and Germany – all of which have announced major new military support over the last three weeks – could take months to arrive in numbers substantial enough to bolster Ukraine’s defenses on the battlefield, officials said.
That has raised questions about Ukraine’s ability to hold off the Russian attacks that have had Ukraine at a disadvantage for several months.
Yet there is little time for Ukraine to lose against a steady Russian advance.
Avril D. Haines, the director of U.S. national intelligence, told Congress on Thursday that Russia could potentially break through some Ukrainian front lines in parts of the country’s east. A widely anticipated Russian offensive this month or next only adds to the sense of gravity.
“The Russian army is now trying to take advantage of the situation while we are waiting for deliveries from our partners, primarily the United States,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said Monday at a news conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
He noted that “some deliveries have already been done” but added, “I will only say that we haven’t gotten all we need to equip our brigades.”
Stoltenberg also sounded impatient. “Announcements are not enough,” he said. “We need to see the delivery of the weapons.”
A confidential U.S. military assessment this week concluded that Russia would continue to make marginal gains in the east and southeast leading up to May 9, the Victory Day holiday, a senior U.S. official said. However, it concluded that the Ukrainian military would not collapse completely along the front lines despite the severe ammunition shortages, the official said.
Other U.S. officials do not believe Russia has the forces to make a major push before May 9, a day Moscow usually uses to show off its military might. That would require a large buildup of forces that U.S. officials so far have not seen.
Still, analysts inside and outside the U.S. government said it would probably be summer at best, and year’s end at worst, before Ukraine can stabilize its front lines with the new infusion of aid.
And Ukrainian troops need training to use some weapons before they can be transferred, like the third German donation of a Patriot system that was announced April 13.
On Monday, around 70 Ukrainian troops will begin a six-week course on the Patriots at an air base in eastern Germany. That is accelerated from the six-to-nine-month course that German air forces generally undergo, said Col. Jan-Henrik Suchordt, the branch head of surface-based air and missile defenses at Germany’s air force headquarters.
“You can’t just give away a weapons system like Patriot without training the people on how to use it,” Suchordt said in an interview Thursday.
Soldiers from several Ukrainian brigades across the front lines expressed great relief that more Western weapons were on the way but said they had yet to see any of the vitally important artillery shells and other equipment needed for the day-to-day battles.