WASHINGTON – The Pentagon is reportedly playing catch-up, preparing a military aid package for Ukraine worth up to $1 billion after the House on Saturday finally passed a supplemental funding bill to continue supplying Kyiv with the critical weapons it needs to dispel Russian invaders.
The first tranche of military aid from the new supplemental is expected to include much of the same munitions the US has sent in previous packages, which Ukraine has burned through in the six months it took between the supplemental request in October and its passage in the House over the weekend, US officials told The Post on Tuesday.
However, the bill must first jump its last hurdle — final approval in the Senate — before the Biden administration will send any additional aid, though it’s nearly guaranteed to pass.
Pentagon press secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder on Tuesday declined to comment on any pre-construction of the package or detail what would be sent first, but said, “It’s a good assumption to expect that [the next package] will include air-defense capabilities, as well as artillery ammunition.”
“I don’t have anything to announce right now in terms of what that aid could look like. You know, we need to have a law first,” he said.
“… [but] anticipating this, we’re doing everything we can to lean forward to be able to provide additional security assistance to Ukraine as quickly as possible, so much more to follow in the days ahead.”
Specifically, those items could include armored vehicles, “Stinger air defense munitions, additional ammunition for high-mobility artillery rocket systems, 155 millimeter artillery ammunition, TOW and Javelin anti-tank munitions and other weapons that can immediately be put to use on the battlefield,” Reuters reported Tuesday, citing two anonymous US officials.
In response to the expected renewed US aid, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Tuesday said Moscow would “increase the intensity of attacks on logistics centers and storage bases for Western weapons” in Ukraine, according to the ministry’s Telegram channel.
Noting the desperate situation, Ryder said the Pentagon would “do everything we can to lean forward, employ [our] robust logistics network capability, employ the relationships that we’ve built with our international allies and partners to get a [package] there quickly.”
“Needless to say we understand the importance and the urgency and are doing everything we can to be poised to respond quickly,” he said.
The aid cannot come soon enough as Ukraine struggles to keep up with Russia’s constant barrages amid dwindling supplies, said John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defending Democracries nonpartisan think tank.
“I would hope that [the Pentagon has] sort of been taking preparatory measures to make the aid start as quick as possible once they get to go ahead,” he said.
While Ryder asserted that the bill must first be signed into law before the Pentagon can begin sending aid, Hardie said the Biden administration “could go and start today if they wanted to” since the president has failed to use up all of the previously approved authority to send billions of dollars worth of weapons from US stockpiles.
“Now that we know there’s going to be a supplemental package and it’s just a matter of sort of dotting the Is and crossing the Ts, the administration could go ahead and use the leftover $4 billion that they haven’t wanted to use because they didn’t know if there was going to be a supplemental,” he said.
Still, it will take time before Ukraine can claw its way back into the position it had before the months-long pause in US aid after its military suffered some territorial losses due to the setbacks it faced without regular US packages to restock artillery and ammunition.
It’s also unclear how much time it will take to reinvigorate the US defense industrial base and boost its rates of production that slowed without continued funding, defense experts have cautioned in recent weeks, to meet Ukraine’s needs
But the US is not alone there, as British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Tuesday said the United Kingdom would put its “own defense industry on a war footing” to ensure it can provide Ukraine with enough weapons and equipment to defend itself.
“One of the central lessons of the war in Ukraine is that we need deeper stockpiles of munitions and for industry to be able to replenish them more quickly,” Sunak said at a press conference in Poland alongside.
Meanwhile, Shoigu told his staff Tuesday that Moscow would also “increase the production of the most in-demand weapons and military equipment” in response to the West stepping up its support, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Telegram.
