SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (AP) — The United States will provide nearly $1 billion more in longer-term arms support to Ukraine, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday as the Biden administration races to spend all the money approved by Congress indicate that it still has to strengthen Kiev before newly elected President Donald Trump takes office next month.
The latest package includes more drones and ammunition for the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, that the US has supplied. While these weapons are urgently needed now, they will be funded through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays for the contracting of longer-term systems.
The purchased weapon systems are often intended to support Ukraine’s future military capabilities and do not immediately make a difference on the battlefield.
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The $988 million package comes on top of another $725 million in U.S. military aid, including counter-drone systems and HIMARS munitions, which was announced Monday and would be pulled from the Pentagon’s stockpiles to reach the front lines faster. The US has provided more than $62 billion in military aid to Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022.
Ukraine is facing an intensified attack from Russia, which is now deploying thousands of North Korean troops to step up its fight to take back the Kursk region. Moscow has also launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile, regularly hitting Kiev’s civilian infrastructure.
With questions about whether Trump will maintain military aid to Ukraine, the Biden administration has sought to spend every dollar left from a massive foreign aid bill passed earlier this year to put Ukraine in the strongest position possible to take.
“This government has made its choice. So does a bipartisan coalition in Congress. The next administration must make its own choice,” Austin said during an annual meeting of national security officials, defense contractors and lawmakers at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
Trump had a hastily arranged meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and France’s Emmanuel Macron on Saturday while in Paris for the reopening of Notre Dame. Macron and other European leaders are trying to convince Trump to maintain support for Ukraine.
Trump, a longtime admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has criticized U.S. aid to Ukraine and called for a quick end to the war, raising concerns in Ukraine about the terms that could be set for any future negotiations.
Austin said he was “confident that President Reagan would have stood on the side of Ukraine, American security and human freedom.”
It was one of Austin’s last major speeches as President Joe Biden’s defense secretary and capped his more than 41 years as a soldier and general.
Under Austin’s watch, the Pentagon launched a regular meeting in 2022, now involving more than 50 countries, to figure out how to send the tens of millions of munitions and billions of dollars in advanced weapons to Ukraine. Without that outpouring of support, it is possible that the country would have fallen into Russia’s hands after the invasion.
“Together we helped Ukraine survive a massive attack by Europe’s largest military,” Austin said.
Austin and Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the longtime Republican leader, were honored at the conference for their lifetimes of service, and they took the opportunity to urge that the U.S. continue to build and sustain their alliances, a sharp contrast with Trump’s ‘America’. First “policy.
Austin called the Ukraine Defense Contact Group “the most consequential global coalition since the days of President George HW Bush and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990,” showing that “America and our friends have become the arsenal of Ukrainian democracy.”
Before Saturday’s announcement, about $8 billion remained to remove existing weapons from U.S. stockpiles and to contract additional weapons to help Ukraine.
“We’re not going to stop Putin by telling Ukraine we’re not going to give you anything anymore,” Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said during a panel at the Reagan National. Defense Forum.