Lethal American military aid should arrive in Ukraine in a matter of “weeks,” to the delight of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and U.S. national security hawks.
“The first delivery should happen in a very few weeks,” Poroshenko said during a Thursday news conference, according to Reuters.
The weapons should help the Ukrainian military fight against a Russian-backed separatist movement in eastern Ukraine. That conflict, which followed with the Russian annexation of Crimea, sent relations between Russia and the West spiraling to “a low point” of the post-Cold War era. President Trump’s authorization of the military sales thus escalates U.S. confrontation with Russia in a key theater.
The incoming weapons are portable anti-tank Javelin missiles and launch units, part of a $47 million deal.
“This proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by improving the security of Ukraine,” the Pentagon announced Thursday.
“The Javelin system will help Ukraine build its long-term defense capacity to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity in order to meet its national defense requirements. Ukraine will have no difficulty absorbing this system into its armed forces.”
“Ukraine is a critical ally to the United States, and I am so pleased to see our country provide this long-overdue assistance in Ukraine’s fight to push back against growing Russian aggression,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, said Thursday in response to Poroshenko’s announcement.
Ernst, as a member of the Armed Services Committee, is one of the lawmakers who wrote language in a defense bill that authorized $350 million in funding for defensive lethal aid to Ukraine. “I have continually stressed the importance of supporting our partners around the globe,” she said.” Providing lethal aid to Ukraine shows that the United States is serious about protecting the interests of our nation and our allies.”
Putin denounced the aid as fanning the conflict.
“Such a decision would not change the situation but the number of casualties could increase,” he said in September. “It is hard to say how the self-proclaimed republics may react to the supply of U.S. weapons to the conflict zone … They might deploy weapons to other areas of the conflict that are sensitive for those who create problems for them.”
That’s a thinly-veiled threat, in light of U.S. assessments of the conflict.
“It’s not an internal strife,” U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Kurt Volker said in November. “It is one where on the eastern side you have 100 percent Russian command and control of what’s happening there, and on the Ukrainian side obviously it’s Ukraine, and nothing is decided. There are obviously people hired to work in the military operation, to work in the civilian administration, the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics, people hired to do that. But this is Russian-directed, and so the relevant interlocutor here is Russia.”
