The U.S. is putting the finishing touches on one of its largest Ukraine military aid packages to date, preparing to ink contracts for as much as $6 billion worth of weapons and equipment for Kyiv’s forces, Politico wrote citing two U.S. officials, APA reports.
The package, which could be finalized and announced as soon as Friday, will dip into the $61 billion in Ukraine funding signed into law by President Joe Biden on Wednesday. It would include Patriot air defense munitions, artillery ammunition, drones, counter-drone weapons, and air-to-air missiles to be fitted on fighter planes, according to the two officials and a third person familiar with the planning.
The equipment — which also includes ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems — likely won’t arrive in Ukraine for several years, as the money is being allocated under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. Under USAI, the Pentagon issues contracts to American defense firms to build new equipment for Ukraine, as opposed to drawing from current U.S. stocks.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is expected to announce the new aid during a virtual meeting on Friday of the 50-plus nations that make up the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. It will be a big boost after the U.S. was forced to show up empty-handed for the monthly gathering for months while the funding was stalled in Congress.
The package, which comes on top of the $1 billion in more immediate aid announced by Washington on Wednesday, comes as Kyiv is being outgunned and outmanned by Russian forces as the Russian war industry is running at full capacity.
The Biden administration last month secretly shipped the long-range version of the ATACMS to Ukraine for the first time in the two-year war — and Kyiv has already used the weapon several times to strike deep behind Russian lines.
The $1 billion in immediate aid and long-rage missiles follows a similar move by the U.K., which first sent its long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine in May 2023, giving Kyiv the ability to hit targets up to 155 miles away. The weapon, which is launched from Ukrainian fighter planes, has allowed Ukraine to precisely target ammunition dumps, bridges and other critical infrastructure deep inside Russian-occupied Crimea.
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