Forbes: The US Is Ready To Provide Ukraine With Weapons Worth A Record $8 Billion
- 26.09.2024, 14:21
There is a catch.
The United States plans to provide Ukraine with a record $8 billion worth of American-made weapons. This should be one of Ukraine's largest military benefits from the United States during the war with Russia. Forbes. reported.
However, the media says the promised weapons will not arrive in Ukraine quickly.
“What the Americans are planning to do is to promise to provide assistance within a year — instead of providing it in small batches every few weeks. And they do this within strict legislative and political restrictions,” the newspaper writes.
The deployment of aid was preceded by a complex policy. When the U.S. Congress finally approved $61 billion in further aid to Ukraine in April, the administration quickly began spending the most “flexible money” under that funding. Successive batches of aid included urgently needed artillery ammunition and air defence missiles.
“Flexible money” falls under the Presidential Drawdown Authority or PDA. This spending capability allows the president to send surplus U.S. military systems to an ally country in the short term, but only if the president notifies Congress and then replaces the shipped weapons with new weapons paid for with PDA funds.
The PDA is just one of the budget agencies that the White House uses to send weapons to Ukraine. The administration is also raising a separate pool of money under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays U.S. contractors to build brand-new weapons — over months or years — and deliver them to Ukraine when they're ready.
PDA-funded weapons are old, but delivered quickly. The USAI-funded weapons are new, but they are delivered slowly. Since 2022, Congress has approved $33 billion in funding for USAI and $46 billion for PDAs. Now the White House has spent $26 billion on the first one, and almost $40 billion on the second one.
“The problem with current PDA funding is that, by law, it expires at the end of fiscal year 2024 — September 30. Congress can extend that deadline through legislation, but there are enough Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives who are friendly to Russia and hostile to Ukraine to make the extension politically difficult, especially given that weeks before the presidential election.
Forbes recalls that it was the Republicans who blocked the latest USAI and PDA permits. The long aid blockade effectively deprived Ukrainian forces of critical ammunition at a crucial moment in the wider war — and may have been a decisive factor in the fall of the Ukrainian fortress city of Avdiivka.
Last week, an extension seemed increasingly unlikely, with the White House proposing a current plan to spend all remaining PDA funds before the September 30 deadline. This is the only possible way for Biden to spend PDA funds before they expire.
In practice, this means that this week's PDA announcements are likely to be the last PDA announcements until the new Congress convenes in 2025 and possibly considers additional funding for Ukraine.
According to the law, the president must announce Congress what weapons he collects for further transfer to an ally. Thus, the only redundant systems that the White House can legally send to Ukraine in the foreseeable future are those it has already announced or is due to announce this week.
The assistance package, in particular, will include new glide bombs — 70-mile Joint Standoff Weapon. Ukraine also wants to get a cruise bomb for F-16 fighters.