The United States is hoping Ukraine can degrade Russia’s military capabilities to the point that Moscow is not able to “do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said.
The secretary’s comments, which he made on Monday in Poland, came after he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as other local government officials. In the meeting, the U.S. announced additional military aid.
The Cabinet secretaries informed Zelensky that the U.S. would provide a newly approved $713 million in foreign military financing for Ukraine and 15 allied and partner countries, which included $322 million specifically for Kyiv, and that the State Department notified Congress on Sunday of a foreign military sale of up to $165 million for nonstandard ammunition for Ukraine.
“We want to see Ukraine remain a sovereign country, a democratic country able to protect its sovereign territory. We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Austin told reporters. “So it has already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
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A senior U.S. defense official told reporters last week that the Pentagon assesses Russia still has roughly 75% of its military capabilities that it had at the beginning of the invasion.
The U.S. has now provided roughly $3.7 billion in military assistance since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24. The type of military equipment it has provided has changed from the start of the war to the more recent packages because the weapons Ukrainians need have changed due to the changed fighting terrain.
“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,” Austin said. “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.”
Russia began its invasion with the intent to topple Kyiv in a matter of days, but after weeks of unsuccessful attempts, its forces retreated and shifted their focus to the Donbas region in the east, which is a contested Ukrainian territory that has a strong pro-Russian separatist faction.
In total, the U.S. has provided Ukrainian forces with more than 1,400 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 5,500 Javelin anti-armor systems, 14,000 other anti-armor systems, 700 Switchblade tactical unmanned aerial systems, 90 155 mm howitzers, 183,000 155 mm artillery rounds, 16 Mi-17 helicopters, and hundreds of Humvees, among other weapons.
The U.S. has trained and will continue to teach limited numbers of Ukrainian soldiers on various weapons it is providing, with the expectation that they will then return to Ukraine with the knowledge and ability to train other soldiers. The Ukrainians have been trained on the Switchblades, the Phoenix Ghost tactical unmanned aerial systems, which are similar to the Switchblade drones that attack targets, and the howitzers.
Austin and Blinken also told Zelensky that President Joe Biden would be nominating Bridget Brink, the U.S. ambassador to Slovakia, to be ambassador to Ukraine, a position that has been vacant for two years, and that the U.S. will return its diplomats to Ukraine “next week,” Blinken told reporters.
The defense secretary will be meeting with many of his European counterparts on Tuesday in Germany.
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“Topics will range on the agenda from obviously the latest battlefield assessment of the renewed Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine to energizing the Defense Industrial Base in an effort to continue the steady flow of security assistance,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said last week when announcing the meeting, adding that the group will also be “taking a longer, larger view at Ukraine’s defense needs going forward.”
