A senior U.S. defense official has pushed back on lawmakers’ claims that U.S. aid is not getting to Ukraine quickly enough.
Gen. Tod Wolters, the head of U.S. European Command, was asked during multiple days of testimony on Capitol Hill about the speed with which U.S. military aid was getting to Ukrainian forces, which they said was slowed. The defense official pushed back on that notion during a Thursday briefing.
PENTAGON: ‘SMALL NUMBERS’ OF RUSSIAN TROOPS LEAVING KYIV, ‘NOT A REAL WITHDRAWAL’
“There’s nothing slow about the pace,” the official said, explaining that the second-most recent aid package, which was $350 million of security assistance, arrived “in about three weeks, which is unprecedented, never been done that fast.”
Rep. Joe Wilson, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, referenced “the delay in providing the equipment to the people of Ukraine” during Wednesday’s hearing.
Later in the hearing, when Wilson’s comment was brought up by another lawmaker, Wolters explained that there are two centers with roughly 100 staffers that liaise with Ukrainian forces.
They are “working both the security assistance items in the military dimension and the humanitarian assistance items, and it’s an iterative process, and it’s based off supply and demand and extends with feelers into Ukraine at the ministerial level and at the CHOD level to make sure the right stuff goes in at the right time to deliver the appropriate effect and the campaign, based off access to get in and access to get out,” he said. “It’s not perfect by any means, but it continues to improve over time.”
The Biden administration recently agreed to provide $800 million to the Ukrainians. They announced the move on March 16, the executive order was signed the next day, and “the first delivery arrived on the 20th, so four days after the president signed it,” the official said.
“I don’t know how anyone can describe that as anything other than expeditious and aggressive,” the official added.
Part of the issue has been America’s role as a facilitator to other countries’ military transfers to Ukraine. The United States held up a Polish plan that would’ve provided Ukrainian forces with MiG-29 jets though they would’ve been transferred from a U.S. military base in Europe because, in the Department of Defense’s estimation, the deal was “high risk” amid concerns that Russia would’ve viewed the move as escalatory.
Slovakian Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad’ said his country was ready to provide Ukraine with a Russian-made S-300 missile defense system as long as the U.S. replaces it with another one at least as capable. The Ukrainians know how to operate the system, and it’s an improvement over what they’re currently using.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
This deal hasn’t happened yet, two weeks after the Slovakian defense minister’s remarks, which came alongside Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
“Time and time again, this administration has been petrified of Putin, too afraid that common-sense actions to support our partners and allies may be deemed escalatory,” ranking member Mike Rogers said during the hearing. “As a result, they were way too slow to get aid to Ukraine.”
“We should have started back in Thanksgiving with visible, aggressive deliveries of lethal aid to Ukraine. Instead, the White House wasted months. The first presidential drawdown package didn’t start flowing to Ukraine until January of this year,” the Republican congressman from Alabama said.
