Some 14 wide-bodied aircraft transported a bristling array of Javelin anti-tank missiles, rocket launchers, guns and ammunition to an airfield near Ukraine’s border Friday, as the United States and European allies ramped up their efforts to give the Ukrainian military a leg up in battling a foreign enemy that far outguns it.
The top US military adviser to President Joe Biden inspected the weapons transfer operation in an unannounced trip, meeting with troops and personnel from 22 countries who were working around the clock to unload the armaments for transport by land to the Ukrainian forces.
The US weaponry, which included the Javelins as well as small arms and munitions, was part of a $350 million package that Biden authorised Saturday; within two days, one official said, the deliveries were landing at an airfield near the border that can process 17 aeroplanes a day. What began as a trickle — with only two or three planes arriving a day — is now a steady flow, the official said, with 14 loads from one airfield alone.
Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, included a stop at the airfield as part of a trip to the region. As he spoke to troops, cargoes of Javelins rolled behind him. Nearby, two C-17s, the enormous cargo workhorses of the US Air Force, sat on the tarmac.
The United States has delivered nearly 70% of the $350 million package to Ukraine’s military, a senior Pentagon official said Friday. It expects to complete the entire shipment in the next week or so.
The shipment of weapons — which also includes Stinger anti-aircraft missiles from US military stockpiles, mostly in Germany — represents the largest single authorised transfer of arms from US military warehouses to another country, the Pentagon official said.
US officials said the weaponry, equipment and other war materiel were being flown to neighbouring countries like Poland and Romania and then shipped over land into western Ukraine to commanders for distribution across the country.
The weapons have quickly found their way into the hands of Ukrainian soldiers, who are using them to fight the advancing Russian force, US officials said Friday.
“All of us have been tremendously impressed by how effectively the Ukrainian armed forces have been using the equipment that we’ve provided them,” said the senior Pentagon official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. “Kremlin watchers have also been surprised by this, and how they have slowed the Russian advance and performed extremely well on the battlefield.”
A special coordination cell reporting to the US military’s European Command in Stuttgart, Germany, is managing the torrent of weapons and equipment from the United States and at least 14 other countries, including Britain, Canada and Lithuania, the Pentagon official said.
Previous arms drawdowns, as the government calls shipments taken from existing US military stocks, have taken weeks or months to wend their way through the Washington bureaucracy and then to delivery in the field.
A $60 million arms package to Ukraine announced in August, for example, was not completed until November. The last portions of a $200 million weapons package announced in late December were still trickling into Ukraine, the Pentagon official said.
Altogether, the United States has provided more than $3 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, when Russia first invaded parts of the country. About $1 billion of that has been sent in the past year, under the Biden administration.
Russian fighter-bombers and ground forces have so far been too busy with a stiff resistance from Ukrainian air and land forces to attack the arms deliveries moving into western Ukraine. But US analysts warn that could quickly shift, especially as Russian forces in the south and east have picked up momentum in recent days. A northern advance on Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, remained largely stalled, Pentagon officials said.
The weapons also include rocket launchers from the Dutch, Javelins from the Estonians, Stinger surface-to-air missiles from the Germans, Poles and Latvians, and machine guns and sniper rifles from the Czechs.
Because of concern over drawing Russian attention, reporters accompanying Milley were not permitted to disclose exactly where along Ukraine’s border the aircraft were unloading.
Milley also travelled to a training field near Nowa Deba, in southern Poland, where paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne have been training with Polish troops. The coordination is part of Biden’s effort to reassure Eastern European allies — and assure President Vladimir Putin of Russia — that while NATO is not sending troops into Ukraine, which is not a member of the alliance, it will fight any incursion into the territory of a NATO member.
Officials were adamant that NATO was standing up to Putin. “NATO is more unified than I’ve ever seen NATO unified before,” Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli, commander of US Army Europe and Africa, told reporters at the training centre. “I’ve been working since I was a second lieutenant, in 1988, and I can tell you I’ve never seen the resolve, and the practical expression of combat readiness, as I’ve seen in the alliance ground forces right now. It’s remarkable.”
Shortly after meeting with troops at Nowa Deba, Milley flew by helicopter to Rzeszow, Poland, headquarters of the 82nd Airborne in the country, which, he said, was deployed to “deter any further territorial aggression by Russia.”
Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, who commanded the US evacuation from Afghanistan after Kabul fell to the Taliban in August and who is the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne, said the Polish headquarters could temporarily house some 2,500 evacuees from Ukraine. The site, which is in an arena, is meant to be a staging ground for evacuees who are citizens of the United States and other NATO countries. Bunk beds filled the room, most of them empty.
Officials said that while there had been a deluge of Ukrainian refugees crossing the border, the number of US evacuees was small. Most US citizens who left Ukraine travelled by air or crossed at other areas along Ukraine’s borders, the officials said.
At an operations centre in the arena, Polish border guards, US intelligence officials, paratroopers and State Department desk officers huddled over maps of Ukraine.
“They were smart to bring in all US government agencies and international partners working on solutions for Ukraine,” said Col. Dave Butler, a spokesperson for Milley.
