The Biden administration is preparing to announce its “substantial” final package of military assistance to Ukraine before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20, defense officials said Jan. 7.
The military assistance, which is to be drawn from existing U.S. stocks, will be detailed when Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III convenes the 25th meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group on Jan. 9. That coalition of some 50 countries was established to coordinate aid to Kyiv.
But Pentagon officials acknowledge they will not be able to spend all of the funds they have on hand to help Ukraine before Trump assumes the presidency.
“There will be more than a couple of billion dollars remaining in PDA assistance for future use after Jan. 20,” one senior defense official told a small group of reporters, referring to the Presidential Drawdown Authority used to replenish U.S. stocks of weapons given to Kyiv.
As Russian forces continue to make small advances in eastern Ukraine and Ukrainian troops counterattack in Russia’s Kursk province, the future of the conflict may be entering a critical phase.
Trump vowed during the presidential campaign to quickly negotiate an end to the war, which is estimated to have led to more than one million dead and wounded on both sides,
But Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown little interest in a negotiated compromise.
Trump has named an envoy to pursue potential talks with Moscow, retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg. But the willingness of the incoming administration to continue military support to Kyiv is unclear, and Trump has recently trained his national security focus on his hopes to buy Greenland and his complaints over Panama’s administration of its canal.
The uncertain prospects for diplomacy over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have spurred a debate over whether the Biden administration moved too slowly to provide Kyiv with sophisticated weapons, such as F-16 fighters and ATACMS surface-to-surface missiles.
Critics have argued the U.S. should have provided Ukraine with key weapons systems like the F-16s and ATACMS before Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in 2023, which failed to achieve a breakthrough. The F-16s, those critics say, would have helped Ukraine to better defend its skies from Russia’s aerial assaults of missiles, drones, and glide bombs.
Pentagon officials pushed back against the notion that its approach of gradually providing more capable weapons hampered Ukraine’s defenses.
There is “a misperception that I believe is out there, that we, the United States, should have done more sooner to support Ukraine’s defense,” a second senior defense official said.
“What Ukraine needed in 2022 was, first and foremost, the capabilities to fight off the Russian assault on Kyiv,” the first defense official said. “So that was the focus, and that was driven by what the Ukrainians needed in 2022, and that included countries being willing to send Soviet legacy aircraft because that’s what Ukrainian pilots knew how to fly. In 2022, they didn’t know how to fly things like F-16s.”
Kyiv had appealed for the Western aircraft and proposed in 2022 that aircrew training begin on the multirole F-16s even if the aircraft themselves would not arrive right away.
Some 79 F-16s have been pledged to Ukraine by the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, and Norway after the U.S. gave approval for the transfers in summer 2023. Ukrainian pilots have been trained on F-16s in the U.S. and Europe by a coalition of allies. Denmark and the Netherlands, the most vocal supporters of providing Ukraine with F-16s, began delivering used F-16s from their stocks to Ukraine in late summer 2024.
The U.S. also provided ATACMS surface-to-surface missiles in October 2023, but they were not sent until Ukraine’s counteroffensive had begun to run out of steam.
With the conflict gridlocked, the Pentagon said it is up to the Trump administration to determine future Ukraine policy, including what security guarantees Kyiv might receive in a potential peace settlement.
“What we are focused on right now, especially at the Pentagon, is providing Ukraine with the defense capabilities that we can provide in the time we have, including putting things on contract that will be delivered throughout 2025 and into 2026 in order to build that capability so that Ukraine can be in the strongest possible position if it comes to a negotiation,” the first defense official said. “Our calculation is that Putin is not one to give up something that he doesn’t have to give up, and Putin is going to be most impressed as he faces a negotiation, and he faces a war in which he has not yet achieved his objectives, and which the costs are building up on him. He is going to be more inclined to be reasonable, to listen to Ukrainian requirements, the stronger Ukraine is on the battlefield.”