The U.S. is poised to send an additional three billion dollars in aid to Ukraine as the combat against Russia now extends beyond a six-month span.
“As Russia's war on Ukraine drags on, U.S. security assistance is shifting to a longer-term campaign that will likely keep more American military troops in Europe into the future, including imminent plans to announce an additional roughly $3 billion in aid to train and equip Ukrainian forces to fight for years to come, U.S. officials said.
U.S. officials told The Associated Press that the package is expected to be announced Wednesday, the day the war hits the six-month mark and Ukraine celebrates its independence day. The money will fund contracts for as many as three types of drones, and other weapons, ammunition, and equipment that may not see the battlefront for a year or two, they said.
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| Ukraine's national flag waves in central Kharkiv |
The total of the aid package — which is being provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and is the largest to date— could change a bit overnight, but not likely by much. Officials said that it will include money for the small, hand-launched Puma drones, the longer-endurance Scan Eagle surveillance drones, which are launched by catapult, and, for the first time, the British Vampire drone system, which can be launched off ships.
Several officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the aid before its public release.
Unlike most previous packages, the new funding is largely aimed at helping Ukraine secure its medium- to long-term defense posture, according to the officials familiar with the matter. Earlier shipments, most of them done under Presidential Drawdown Authority, have focused on Ukraine’s more immediate needs for weapons and ammunition and involved materiel that the Pentagon already has in stock that can be shipped in short order.
In addition to providing longer-term assistance that Ukraine can use for potential future defense needs, the new package is intended to reassure Ukrainian officials that the United States intends to keep up its support, regardless of the day-to-day back and forth of the conflict, the officials said.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg noted the more extended focus Tuesday as he reaffirmed the alliance’s support for the conflict-torn country.
‘Winter is coming, and it will be hard, and what we see now is a grinding war of attrition. This is a battle of wills, and a battle of logistics. Therefore we must sustain our support for Ukraine for the long term, so that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent nation’, Stoltenberg said, speaking at a virtual conference about Crimea, organized by Ukraine.
Six months after Russia invaded, the war has slowed to a grind, as both sides trade combat strikes and small advances in the east and south. Both sides have seen thousands of troops killed and injured, as Russia’s bombardment of cities has killed countless innocent civilians.
There are fears that Russia will intensify attacks on civilian infrastructure and government facilities in Ukraine in the coming days because of the independence holiday and the six-month anniversary of the invasion”. -Lolita C. Baldor and Matthew Lee, AP
Concurrently, the Ukrainian government responded to Russian claims that a Ukrainian agent was responsible for the Darya Dugina assassination.
“On the latest Russian reports, the bomb was attached to Dugin’s car inside his guarded compound. Ukraine focuses on military targets, unlike Russia, and there is no discernible gain in attacking one of Putin’s media puppets or allocating scarce operatives inside the Russian Federation to such a goal that is meaningless to the liberation of Ukraine”. -Yuri Felshtinsky
Their primary concern is always optics and their supposed defense is motivational rather than factual.
Alluding to Ukrainian moral superiority is nothing more than rhetorical posturing thrown out to obfuscate the fact that open-source data indicates that the suspect, 43-year-old Natalya Vovk, served in the Ukrainian military and went as far as renting an apartment in the same block where Dugina lived before the car bombing.
The reaction of the U.S. Department of State to the high-profile murder and the evidence that Russia released in the investigation discredits Washington’s claim that it is concerned about human rights.
“Washington has no moral right to judge the state of human rights in faraway places if they don’t even comment on the murder of a journalist”, despite claiming to care about protecting the media, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Tuesday in a social media post. “They simply did not take notice that she was a public figure”.
Not only is the purported “Russian propaganda” well-founded in fact, but there is no practical reason for the Russians to rush the inevitable end of this conflict, as time is clearly on their side. Western economies are crumbling, Ukrainians are running out of infantry, weapons, and supplies, China, India, Iran, Brazil, Venezuela, and the Arab nations have all made it clear they are aligned with Russia against NATO, and Russia now refuses to ship natural gas to countries that refuse to pay in rubles.
The Russian goal of assisting the Donbass militias to clear their land of the Ukrainian military is very nearly complete within six months of its onset and the way that they have directed their focus on attrition warfare in the Donbass would indicate that Russia has been holding back its forces in preparation to take on NATO directly.
“Russia is not at war with Ukraine, it is driving the devil out of Ukraine, this is a geopolitical exorcism”. -Alexander Dugin