With ten days left in power, the Biden administration has committed what may be the final package of security assistance it sends to Ukraine.
Valued at $500m, the donation covers coveted capbailities such as missile defence, air-to-ground munitions for F-16 jets, bridging systems, and other forms of materiel. This package is the government’s 74th tranche to come from its own war stocks since August 2021.
Ahead of the transfer of power to a provocative and erratic President-elect, Donald Trump, the extant Defense Secretary, Lloyd J. Austin, returned from the Ukraine Defense Contact Group – his own creation – at Ramstein Air Base in Germany for the last time on 9 January 2024, where he signed off on the latest military aid.
During the Ramstein session, Austin urged his colleagues, representatives of nearly 50 allied nations, to keep up their support for Ukraine: “this coalition has had their backs for nearly three hard years of war, and we must not stop now.”
However, European support for Ukraine seems to be a secondary issue when compared to the unpredictable calculus of the coming US President.
In early December 2024, Austin warned that “America is weaker when it stands alone” in what he may have intended as advice to the forthcoming Trump administration. Though, since the New Year, this advice appears to have fallen on deaf ears as the President-elect has picked fights with allies and nations around the US orbit over Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal.
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By GlobalData
Although it appears Ukraine is in an unenviable position of clinging to what is left of its Russian gains in Kursk while Russian forces make gradual advances in Eastern Ukraine, this ostensible progress is more complicated for Russia according to the Instutute for the Study of War.
“Both Russian and Ukrainian forces are struggling to restore manoeuvre to an increasingly transparent battlefield.
“The Russian military will also have to address critical shortcomings in its ability to train frontline commanders and plan military operations if Russian forces aspire to conduct the type of rapid, mechanized manoeuvre that characterised the first few months of the full-scale invasion in early 2022.”
