“More than half” of the howitzers the United States has designated to go to Ukraine have arrived as of Wednesday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
The U.S.’s military assistance to Ukraine since Russia invaded Feb. 24 includes 90 155 mm howitzers, large artillery guns that are operated by a team of about 10 people; 72 tactical vehicles to tow the howitzers; and 183,000 155 mm artillery rounds.
“Without giving whole numbers, more than half of those howitzers are in Ukraine,” Kirby said during Wednesday’s briefing. He also said the first group of Ukrainian officers to be trained on the howitzers, roughly 50 people, had completed it.
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The U.S. is training those Ukrainian military members with hopes that they will be able to go back home and pass the knowledge along to their countrymen and women. Another group of Ukrainian soldiers will be trained on how to use the howitzer, though Kirby was unsure of whether they had already begun. The training is taking place in an undisclosed European country.
The Biden administration announced an $800 million in military aid April 21, and it included 72 of the 90 howitzers, all of the tactical vehicles, and 144,000 artillery rounds. They designated the first 18 howitzers and the remaining 40,000 artillery rounds April 13.
All of the howitzers were designated to go to the Ukrainian army within the past two weeks, 80% of which were designated about a week ago, and somewhere north of 45 of them have already arrived. The howitzers should be enough to equip five battalions, Kirby said last week.
The howitzers became a more crucial need after Russian forces retreated from outside of Kyiv to refocus their efforts on capturing the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, where there is a significant pro-Russian separatist presence in the area. Fighting between the two sides has persisted since 2014. Secondarily, Russian forces are looking to capture the territory along the southeastern coast of Ukraine that will provide them with a land corridor from Crimea, which they annexed in 2014, to the Donbas.
“You’ve heard us talk or say in the past, recent past, the nature of the fight has evolved because the terrain that they’re now focused on is a different type of terrain. So they need long-range fires,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a press conference in Poland on Monday. “You’ve heard them express a need for tanks. And we are doing everything that we can to get them the types of support — the types of artillery and munitions that will be effective in this stage of the fight.”
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The speed at which U.S. military aid has been arriving in Ukraine has been debated, with many lawmakers demanding improvements, while the Pentagon maintains they’re already operating at high levels.
Sen. Steve Daines, a Montana Republican, told the Washington Examiner that the DOD had to “accelerate” and “continue to pick up that pace.” The senator traveled to Kyiv in mid-April and is one of only two U.S. lawmakers to travel to Ukraine since Russia invaded. He also pressed the administration on the quantity of military aid they’re providing, saying that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked the U.S. to provide “at least 100 or more” howitzers.
Weeks ago, Kirby defended the Pentagon from similar criticisms, saying such military aid has “never been done that fast before.”
